Prima della parola: L'ascolto psicoanalitico del non detto attraverso le forme dell'arte: Before words: psychoanalytic listening to the unsaid through art1 by Antonio Di Benedetto. Milan:  Franco Angeli. 2001. pp.  223.

This beautiful book won its author, Antonio Di Benedetto, the 2001 Gradiva Prize, conferred in the delightful village of Lavarone in the Italian Alps. Freud used to love spending his summer holidays there with his family, in the Hotel du Lac, where he wrote ‘Delusions and dreams in Jensen's Gradiva’. In the very same hotel the Gradiva Prize is today awarded to the best Italian book on psychoanalysis of the year.

The author develops two main concepts. The first is that psychoanalysis should apply art to itself, rather than apply itself to art and lay art on the couch. Psychoanalysis should learn to use art as an inspiration for thought and creativity in its clinical work and theory, following in the footsteps of Freud, who much admired the work of poets and noted, precisely in his essay on William Jensen's Gradiva, how poetic intuition often ‘anticipates’ psychoanalysis. In his Preface, Di Benedetto is already proposing this inversion, the key to the whole book: to pass from a ‘psychoanalysis of art’ to a ‘psychoanalysis by art’, to a science inspired by art, reappraising the poetical roots of psychoanalysis. After all, for every one of us the formation of the alpha element—pictogram, audiogram, coenaestheticgram, olfactogram or whatever it might be—is indeed poetry of the mind. The specificity of the formation of the alpha element makes it infinitely more subjective or poetic than any primal phantasy, which is instead more or less the same in different minds.

The second concept concerns the use and enhancement of ‘sound’—the information value of verbal musicality in psychoanalysis. In clinical practice it is the visual that has always been privileged (in the analyst's reveries, in dreams, in figurative transformations and in representations). It is not by chance that Bion refers more frequently to the visual alpha elements, while acoustic, olfactory and coenaesthetic elements remain little more than implicit.

The author guides the analyst through the first underlying t