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The cryptic title of this important book – Half Prisoner, Half Winged – comes from painter Paul Klee: “Man is half prisoner, half winged; each of the two parts in which his being is torn, realizing the existence of the other one, becomes aware of its own tragic incompleteness” (1925).
This quotation describes in beautifully poetic words the Body‐Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis of the book's clarifying subtitle. Its author is the Italian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Riccardo Lombardi, already known to English readers for his book Formless Infinity (Routledge, 2015) on Matte Blanco and Bion, as well as for his numerous articles (many on similar topics to those presented in this latest publication) to be found in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and in other psychoanalytic journals.
When mistakes, fault lines, blind spots, or limitations are identified in psychoanalytic theory or technique, there is a risk of over‐compensating for them by exaggerating their importance and promoting extreme solutions to the problem: babies will then risk being thrown out with the bathwater. For instance, Klein may have overstated the importance of envy in early childhood to compensate for the view that infants are still in a symbiotic relationships with their mothers; instead of searching for integration some object relational analysts may have been too quick to dismiss drive theory, and feminist ones to dismiss observable evidence of castration anxiety and penis envy; and some authors may have overstressed the centrality of sibling relationships by suggesting that they should take priority over Oedipal constellations. All of these colleagues were undoubtedly well intentioned, but their enthusiasm may have prevented them from reaching a balanced compromise between the tradition they had good reasons to challenge and the innovations they had equally good reasons to put forward.
In view of the above considerations, and being aware that the issue of body‐mind relationships is