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A Long Dream is the title of the latest book written by Domenico Chianese, training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (Società Psicoanalitica Italiana), of
which he was president from 2001 to 2005. The book, which is a collection of essays and contributions written and presented on different occasions, was published in 2006 soon after the conclusion of his presidency of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society which had seen the author involved in institutional duties. The effect of this experience is perceived in the complex route outlined by Chianese: it crosses the psychoanalytic body which from time to time reveals its different aspects like in a prism. At the same time it tells us about the multiple experiences of the author, who is involved in the dimension of clinical practice and cure, in the work of self-analysis, in the training of candidates and in the transmission of psychoanalysis, in theoretical elaboration and, finally, last but not least, in recording the continuous oscillations between internal reality and external reality and the position of psychoanalysis in the cultural and social context of our time. It is not a book of psychoanalysis or about psychoanalysis, but rather a psychoanalytic text, by virtue of the model used which, above all, constitutes its unifying element and its common thread on the reading journey. As the title already indicates, the reader is invited to enter the author's dream and share the founding method of analytical practice, namely the method of free associations and loss of control on the narrative text, according to the oneiric model.
It is a central question which, in my opinion, also represents the nature of the text. As Bollas (1999) writes:
Freud's discovery of the psychoanalytic method has radically transformed western epistemology. In the attempt to understand what we think, we are asked to abandon the understandable necessity of being scrupulous and objective — in contemporary terms of being scientific — an