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Pia De Silvestris is a psychotherapist who works with children, adolescents and adults. This fine book, which deals mostly with childhood and adolescence, is testament to the author's maturity, both as an analyst and as a person. The book is about the profound meaning and the ethics of psychoanalytical work, and about what it means to become human.
The formal structure of De Silvestris's book and the order of its chapters reflect what she describes as a double time-scheme: the idea that, while in our lives time moves endlessly forwards, in analysis and in the transference there is an inversion of the ordinary direction of time, as we look back to our origins in order to bring about an unpredictable psychic restructuring. As the author puts it, ‘The psychotherapist, like all human beings, cannot avoid passing judgements on this aspect of life, which seems like the most vital and the one that most strives towards the future’. And, she adds, ‘psychic life, according to Freud's theoretical construction of it… moves at the same time in two directions, both of which are vital, without losing sight of the fact that sooner or later we must return to our origins’ (p. 87). Transference, for De Silvestris, involves this kind of going back to our origins.
The book begins with birth and with the name given to the child, which becomes part of a destiny determined by its parents, then discusses early infancy, the oedipal phase, the latency period, ending with adolescence. The author touches on and offers