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In the interview-dialogue by Claudio Neri with Alfredo Lombardozzi—the last chapter of this book and happy occasion for a new narration in dialogic terms of many subjects considered in the book and for a substantial theoretical framing of many authors mentioned there—Neri asks why it is interesting to read the book and who could read it with profit.
In his answer Lombardozzi, an anthropologist conquered by psychoanalysis, a psychoanalyst who keeps feeding on anthropology, points out, in his double identity (a theme, the identity, which will be central in the book), the possibility to look at the two disciplines from within. This look from within could help psychoanalysts who deal with social and cultural facts to avoid ‘fruitless generalizations and misunderstandings’ (p. 191) and could foster in anthropologists a greater sensibility for inner life and maybe a more open and friendly attitude towards psychoanalysis itself. To the cultured person who is not particularly versed in either one or the other discipline, Lombardozzi feels like offering a reconsideration about the relation man-culture and man-nature and wishes to convey that passionate element which he believes fundamental in his reflection.
The introduction, rather than offering a perspective view on the content of the book, introduces the reader to one of the privileged areas of intersection between psychoanalysis and anthropology, the theme of the sacred. This is a theme of great complexity with which Lombardozzi deals starting from Freud's works, with the support of numerous (too many?) theoretical references, going through the manifold and sometimes antithetical articulations within the two fields, requiring the reader to follow him through the theories of different thinkers, belonging to different periods and to different geographical areas. ‘A coming back home’ (for the psychoanalyst reader) is, in the last pages of the chapter, a reference to the current valorization of religion proposed by relational