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Dina Vallino is one of the most renowned authors in her own country, but is, unjustly, still relatively unknown outside Italy. She has been a pioneer in child analysis in Italy and continues to be a point of reference not only in the training of many child analysts but, and even more so, in the development of psychoanalytic theory. Her thinking is part of the Milanese psychoanalytic school, in which she and Antonino Ferro figure prominently. Their cultural references are Bion's and Klein's ideas, including their further developments by Donald Meltzer, Martha Harris and Betty Joseph. Within the context of Bion's and post-Bion theoretical developments, Vallino, however, develops lines of thinking that are very much her own, some of which emerge clearly in this book, a collection of papers, transformed, thanks to a very small amount of editing, into a coherent book of its own.
The book is in two parts. The first part brings together a number of papers under the title ‘Child analysis and changes in the analyst’. This gives a close account of the author's way of working with children, covering various aspects of her technique as well as her evolution as a psychoanalyst over the years. The second part, ‘The encounter with a child in the psychoanalytic consultation’, shows how from the outset it is possible to establish with an as yet unknown child ‘an emotive closeness’, considered the element the child is most missing, and how this can constitute a basis from which to make a new start.
There are two brief introductions, one by Antonino Ferro and the other, unusual for a psychoanalytic text, by the Italian poet Vivian Lamarque.
The author shares Antonino Ferro's perspective on psychic pain as a state of ‘undigested facts’ and the idea of therapy as a process directed towards developing the mind's dreaming and imaginative capabilities. The child is asked not to identify with the analyst's thoughts about him but to develop, himself, his own thoughts about himself. This transfo