Trascrivere l'inconscio. Problemi attuali della clinica e della tecnica psicoanalitica [Transcribing the unconscious. Current problems in psychoanalytical practice and technique] Edited by Adamo Vergine. Milan:  Angeli. 2002.  131 pp.

As the title of the book announces, the thread uniting the works presented here reflects on the linkages between primary and secondary levels of the mind and on the way transcription is possible from one to the other. A training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, Adamo Vergine outlines the evolution of psychoanalytic thought in Italy in his Introduction. He notes that since the 1970s many analysts have shifted their interest to the mainly unconscious level of the analytic experience and have begun to question their faith in the objectivity of the analytic work, giving increasingly more importance to the analyst's subjectivity, the transference and the countertransference. The unconscious psychic reality not only of the patient but also of the analyst is now brought into play during analysis. The possibility for transformation inherent in the analytic experience is thus based also on ‘transcribing’ reciprocally activated emotional contents from the primary to the secondary level of the mind.

On an international level, various psychoanalytic models have emerged that place the ‘analytic relationship’ at the centre of their research, even if from varying stances, whereas in Italy the ‘unconscious relationship’ has increasingly become the focus of interest. Through five studies, this book shows the coincidence of interests in confronting psychoanalytic practice and theory, currently present among diverse Italian analysts. With no prior discussion among the authors, the articles clearly express the interrogatives that animate their creators and that converge on the theme of the linkages between primary and secondary levels of the mind and how transcription from one to the other might be possible: what remains of the unconscious in secondary thought processes and what determines such thought? How are passages and transcriptions from one register to another possible, a function that is constantly in progress both in the analyst's life and in his work with patie