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The two authors, who hold academic posts at the University of Parma, have combined their respective competences in psychoanalysis and semiology in pursuit of the shared aim of exploring the narratological aspect of psychoanalysis. Their research is presented in seven clear and penetrating chapters that deal with the subject in depth on levels extending from general description to precise investigation of the progressively emerging themes.
The foreword by Antonino Ferro, the well-known psychoanalyst who has given us some very significant examples of psychoanalytic narration, immediately facilitates our understanding of the authors’ argument by drawing attention to the book's pivotal position between the different worlds of psychoanalysis and narratology and indicating how these disciplines might be related.
In the view of Arrigoni & Barbieri, the very etymology of the word narrate (gnarare, gnarus) tells us that it is concerned with knowing and the communication of knowledge. The psychoanalytic story as told is surely fully entitled to be investigated in narratological terms. Referring to the already huge body of literature by psychoanalysts and semiologists on the narratological aspects of psychoanalysis, the authors immediately see the importance attached to narration as a problem. Some consider narration to be a part of psychoanalysis, and indeed its principal instrument, the most suitable way of bringing out psychoanalytic facts; but that is not all there is to the psychoanalytic experience. Others shift the emphasis towards narration so far that psychoanalysis comes to correspond to the narration itself—to the analytic story. Another important disagreement is in fact involved here. Some authors take Freud's view that the analytic story narrates some element of the patient's mental heritage, formed within it through various vicissitudes. Others, on the other hand, hold that the story itself constitutes the whole of the analytic experience—that only a narration can