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From the beginning of his career, Pietro Roberto Goisis, an analyst with the Italian Institute of Psychoanalysis, has been engaged in a deep study of the world of the young, and in this carefully produced book we come upon a sentence which invites us to pause and reflect: “recognising the needs of our interlocutors does not mean putting ourselves in the position of satisfying them immediately and unreservedly” (p. 79). This is an assertion which appeals to an intellectual honesty which should be the common heritage of all those who are concerned with that sophisticated and difficult art, learned on the job, called psychoanalysis: or rather, the science of the art of psychotherapy, as Vittorio Lingiardi says in his afterword, even though most people still call it a profession. There is a great difference between practising a profession and dedicating oneself to an art. The first is a social necessity; the second is an intimate passion, a constant urge to think about oneself and the other, and the relationship that is played out between self and other. It requires continual study, work, engagement with others who study it, and above all empathy.
Why would I want to make such an assertion my starting point? Because this intense book does not only have clinical and theoretical value, but can be considered as a sort of essay about training where the acknowledgement of those teachers who have taught the author the art of psychoanalysis with adolescents is never tacit, but constantly overt. Recounting his own clinical development with reference to figures such as Senise and Zapparoli (but also Freud, Winnicott, Bollas, Novelletto, Gallese - to name only a few), means identifying and carefully preserving the memory of his own formative process (always present throughout the book); but it also means showing a gratitude which in today's world - where everyone seems to have been born in one go, all-knowingly, from a Big Bang - is an act of humility and an acknowledgement of one