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Nowadays, psychoanalysis is struggling more than ever with the problem of the ‘representation’ of intra- and inter-psychic phenomena in order to develop a deeper and more accurate understanding of what happens in the patient's mind and in the therapeutic relationship. Frequently, psychoanalysts borrow images and phantasies from books and from the theatre to conceive an appropriate shape for these phenomena that could lay the foundations of a process of signification and conceptualization. Hence the focus is mainly on ‘what’ is put on the stage rather than on ‘how’ it is represented, that is, on the formal device that makes representation possible.
In his most recent book, Petrella attempts to carry out this rather difficult task by combining his experience in clinical psychiatry, his work as a psychoanalyst and his fascination for the theatre. In fact, he is a member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and was a professor of Clinical Psychiatry at the University of Pavia for decades. The author's style is clear and direct and, although the chapters are conceptually rich, they are quite unsaturated. The reader is therefore stimulated to think spontaneously over the concepts and metaphors presented. This allows for a personalized reading of the book, which stems not only from what the author writes but also from the feelings evoked in the reader's mind through associations, imagery and memory. Thus the author addresses his book to “active readers” who are invited to play a role - as well as that of being a mere observer - by becoming interpreters and themselves experiencing a process of knowledge.
In this book, Petrella further discusses his understanding of how the theatrical device - a well-known metapsychological metaphor - and the psychoanalytic process are intertwined. This is done by building upon his previous work, Theatrical Anthropology and Psychoanalysis. He wonders about the relationship between the ‘scene of knowledge’ and the scene that is put on stage, t