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The author of this work, Marina Breccia, is an Italian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who lives and works near Pisa, in Tuscany, where she has also worked for the regional psychiatric services. The book opens with an introduction by Domenico Chianese, which highlights, appropriately, the way in which the text, while focusing on the issue of psychosis, cannot confi ne itself solely to a discussion of this subject. At the heart of the book is an exploration of the image, and the relationship between image and word, between image and thought—an exploration which seeks out the connections which allow the transition from one to the other.
Apart from refl ecting on the treatment of psychosis, this author invites us to think about the use of images in contemporary culture. Whereas psychoanalysis holds that it is important for psychic health to be able to use the image as a point of departure from which to rediscover individual and creative thought, very often in the world today, images are used for denial—they are an ‘excellent example of splitting in its most developed form’ (p. 20). One image is replaced so quickly by the next that there is no time to acknowledge difference and thus no space for thought. Breccia writes,
…we may be remembering those who died in the Nazi concentration camps, but all it takes is one click, the length of time to change from one channel to another, and an image change takes place, whereby, seamlessly, we have been moved into another world and are now presented with a banquet of images of the news or another TV show …. Everything is reduced to 0 time … the banquet thus erases death and destruction. (p. 20)
The book is divided into three parts. In the fi rst part, ‘Desire: A starting point’, the author takes us on a journey that, starting with Freud, also develops various aspects of the theories of desire and the symbol put forward by Lacan, Aulagnier and Assoun. In the second part, Laplanche and Pontalis's concept of fantasme is revisited, after