Reading Italian Psychoanalysis edited by Franco Borgogno Alberto Luchetti and Luisa Marino Coe

Reading Italian Psychoanalysis is an important publishing initiative aimed at offering English-speaking psychoanalytic practitioners the possibility of getting to know Italian psychoanalysis for the first time in an extended, in-depth way. The interest of the book and of the selections made by the editors consists in the fact that writers who are producing work of very great interest are finally accessible to readers of the English language.

The structure of this project, as its editors Franco Borgogno, Alberto Luchetti and Luisa Marino Coe write in the general introduction, has strong roots going back a long time:

It is not only the project of this book but also its content that ‘come from afar’: it comes from an extensive network of a huge number of psychoanalysts in Italy, who, for almost a century and especially over the last 50 years, have passionately dedicated their energies to psychoanalysis, and from the equally vast network of their patients who have fed that work with their heartfelt urge towards transformation. (p. 2)

Forty-eight seminal and representative papers out of such an extensive network have been chosen to illuminate what is distinctive about Italian theoretical and clinical thinking and to highlight the specific character of its psychoanalytic discourse.

To make it easier for the reader to build up a map of this extensive network, the editors decided to gather the selected papers into six thematic parts, highlighting a prevalent viewpoint from which the thematic parts were to be considered, including:

1. History of psychoanalysis in Italy

2. Metapsychology

3. Clinical practice, theory and technique, therapeutic factors

4. The person of the analyst, countertransference and the analytic relationship/field

5. Trauma, psychic pain, mourning and working through

6. Preverbal, precocious, fusional, primitive states of the mind