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The volume Psicologia Dinamica [Dynamic Psychology] by Amadei, Cavanna and Zavattini, published in printed form by Il Mulino Strumenti (2015) and also via the digital platform Pandora Campus, constitutes a publishing undertaking that is not common in the psychoanalytic literary panorama. It is, in fact, a handbook addressed to students of the Psychology Degree Course at the University of Rome—the authors, besides being psychoanalysts, are all university professors, the first two of Dynamic Psychology, Zavattini of the Psychopathology of Couple and Parental Relations—a handbook conceived along particularly innovative lines compared with traditional manuals, and for this reason alone worthy of special attention.
The text, which has contributions from other figures coordinated by the authors, not only offers a broad and detailed panorama of psychoanalytic theory and its developments, but does so by adopting a specific theoretical and clinical approach which reflects the authors’ scientific position and orients the reading of the various chapters which address the broad range of dynamic psychology and its history. Indeed, right from the introduction the authors declare their “positioning within the intersubjective perspective which emphasises the theme of a two-way exchange between processes of internalisation and the external world as a general frame of reference” (p. 11). This “vertex” runs through the text like a fil rouge and defines its configuration, a configuration which does not re-tread the expository model of the traditional handbook, but rather responds to an “experimental” approach in which the scientific angle is strong and governs both the authors’ choices and the form in which they address the various topics. The authors make this clear in declaring that “this handbook is also an experiment” (p. 11), placing a continual emphasis on the scientific framework they have chosen. The very use of the term “dynamic psychology” tends to underline the less than comp