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In this, her first book, Elena Molinari places herself on the roster of major psychoanalytic thinkers through her creative theoretical and clinical work, particularly informed by the visual arts. I say psychoanalytic and not solely child psychoanalytic as her book is replete with implications for the analysis of adults drawn from her analyses of children. Child analysis informs adult analysis through its greater emphasis on shapes and forms, which yield the beginnings of representability. While child analysis can sometimes seem like something off to the side or on the edges of psychoanalysis, this book conveys a conviction I share—that child psychoanalysis prefigures Bionian developments in our field (Brady 2018a). Molinari asserts that child analysis is not an application of adult analysis but the catalyst for Bion’s epistemological revolution. Bion’s second analyst, Melanie Klein's major theoretical innovations were based especially on the play of the very young children she analysed. Molinari suggests (and I heartily agree) that: “Bion integrated into his thoughts the insights yielded by child analysis into the origins of thinking and the earliest forms of mental activity” (3).
It is breathtaking to observe a moment in analysis when a child makes some visual or verbal representation (e.g. a drawing or story) that conveys her grasp of a complex emotional situation. Of course, representability is equally the work of adult analysis—for instance in the need to integrate new and unfamiliar experiences such as childbirth, illness, aging or trauma. Such new experiences require us to do emotional work to elaborate meanings for ourselves.
Molinari offers a wonderful vignette demonstrating the complexity of representability. Seven-year-old Luca faces a holiday break from his analyst. He brings to her office an almost identical target to one that hangs there. Luca hangs his target on top of the other target and proceeds to throw adhesive balls at it. Molinari comments on h