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The authors of this book, edited by Patrizia Cupelloni, are ten psychoanalysts who six years ago founded a research group on melancholia. Readers will sense immediately that they are being introduced to a methodological tool of great refinement and precision and are being invited to share in a deeply rooted passion for Freud's text. The approach to Freud draws on reassessments made by a number of authors, mainly from the French School—among whom Abraham, Torok, Green, Laplanche, Pontalis and Lambotte stand out—together with Winnicott's fundamental line of interpretation.
Within the framework of a shared theoretical–clinical discourse, and independently of the approaches of other schools, each of these ten authors has succeeded in carving out a very personal course of research and analytic style. In detail they examine specific elements relating to melancholy, which they put forward as the central concept of psychoanalytic research in place of ‘depression’, a much-misused term in common and psychiatric language. In so doing, they give back to melancholy that profoundly human dimension that makes it so fascinating. Who does not recognise himself in Dante's ‘Un dì si venne a me melanconia/e disse: io voglio un poco stare teco’ [One day melancholy came to me/ and said: I want to stay awhile with you] (Rime, XXXIV)?
The melancholic person's feeling of emptiness is traced back to the foundations of the mind itself—to that psychic dimension that Patrizia Cupelloni, author of ‘La cripta del silenzio’ [The crypt of silence], calls ‘prehistoric, more than infantile’ (p. 99). The primitiveness that the authors write about is not the primitiveness bound up with the vicissitudes of aggression and its projective reprisals in the relationship with the object described by Kleinian and post-Kleinian writers; the hypothesis that melancholic illness is caused by a traumatic factor converging with an instinctual, constitutional element, for them, points elsewhere. Rather, these authors i