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One does not often come across a book that brings together philosophy, the history of ideas, psychoanalysis and the world of art. Yet that is the complex task that the two authors of this book have managed to accomplish. To use a metaphor from the book, let us get on board the pick-up truck that the boy in the first chapter of this unusual book somehow ‘sees’ among the countless stains on the floor, for thereby we can observe the precarious conquest of the symbols that will enable us to embark on equally unimaginable journeys. We enter the caves of Altamira, where bison crouching in various positions come to life in ways that open up new horizons. But what is the status of images in philosophy? Or better, what has it been? From its humble origins, it has increasingly become an object of interest and study, even if for Freud “thought concerning images is primitive thought […] In dreams we speak through images, only by necessity […] images must be transformed into words” (p. 31).
This is a book that, as it develops, presents us with a very rich iconography, opening up new worlds in the extraordinary and in-depth encounters it allows us to make with characters and scenarios dear to us analysts.
An example of this is the fascinating story that unfolds in the chapter ‘Sopravvivenza e Formule del Pathos’ [‘Survival and Formulae of Pathos’], where we enjoy a magical encounter with Binswanger at the Bellevue, with Freud, and with Warburg while he delivered his lecture of 1923 entitled ‘The Ritual of the Snake’. Warburg here discusses the power of images to wound and to heal, the conquest of symbols but at the same time the precariousness of such a conquest. In this way, he denies that culture could cure human suffering. We are not far here from Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents .
For reasons of space, I can do no more than mention in passing the other powerful pages dedicated to Warburg, to his illness, to his recovery, to his works, and to his complex relationship with