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Subtitled as Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field, I feel that it must be said at the outset that this is not a book for beginners. It seeks to offer a perspective on the psychoanalytic process from the point of view of modern literary theory and post-modernist philosophical analysis. The reader most likely to be fully engaged by this text is one who is practising or has practised psycho-analysis in the working sense. Without this experience and all its rigours, I found it hard to see how a reader would be able to engage with the text in a meaningful way. In itself, this is no criticism but I say it because I think readers should be ready to examine their professional experience and to have taken a position, implicitly or explicitly, on the various issues that it raises. Thus, while the book might seem to read like a statement, I think the reader may find it more fruitful to use it to engage in a debate with themselves and the author about what they do and why they do it their way.
Indeed, because the author, Guiseppe Civitarese, seeks to examine the work of psychoanalysis from points of view that were unfamiliar to me, I found that reading the book was an experience not unlike an analysis. As examples of the issues raised, he explores the nature of psychic reality, the nature and function of the setting, the nature of transference and the nature and function of memory. It seemed to me that there is always in the background