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In the first place, I would like to present this book visually, as the Italian reader sees it. Through the eyes of Italo Calvino, on the jacket we see ‘a hand stretching out of a prison window, reaching for the sea … I was astonished at how it emerged from the rock … the stone wanted to tell me that we were of a common substance’. On
the opening page, we meet the animal kingdom in the figure of the dog James, the ‘living companion’ to whom the book is dedicated.
So, in its non-verbal aspects, in its physical-chemical and animal components, in its silence, the primitive mind asserts itself visually as the ‘necessary background to the weaving of discourse’, through these icons of the first levels of symbolic transformation, the subject of this book.
Striking the ‘A’ note to pitch the type of attention required by the reader of this book, the author indicates the text register. In the chapters that follow (on projective counteridentification, on the a-symbolic aspects of the mind, on psychosis, on micro-hallucinations, on certain religious forms of the mind, on suffering), we see what Bion would call the ‘pre-natals’ come to life, teem, burn and explode. We see them change from noise into sound and finally into voice, pass from the proto-mental level to reverie, to dream thought, to conceptual and abstract thought. Through an abundance of clinical material, ‘the forming of thought seems like the forming of a dream in the waking state, perceivable and expressible as such by the mind of the analyst’ (p. 30). Hautmann's original research acknowledges his roots in the melting pot of the cultural polycentrism of Italian psychoanalysis, in constant dialectic with his colleagues of the English and French schools, and open to Bion's innovative vision: Bion, according to Hautmann, ‘immediately appeared capable of expressing the specific sense of psychoanalysis’. ‘The analytic situation as I have proposed it, which allows the transforming oscillations