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The conspicuous yet agile book published by Marco Conci in 2019 - Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion and the Multiple Voices of International Psychoanalysis - is an original and very useful volume, which will certainly become an essential companion for scholars and students alike. It is “conspicuous” because it collects a wide array of rigorous and thoughtful research into
various relevant fields. And “agile” because the author and contributors help the reader feel oriented and able to easily read its rather formidable 700 pages.
Born on the border of Italy and Austria, Marco is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was trained in various institutes and cities and now lives and works mostly in Germany, Munich, but also in Trento, his home town. He is a member of both the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and the DPG, the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft. His book is therefore the mature result of an uncommonly wide array of clinical experiences and well digested theoretical traditions. The approach proposed in the central part of the book (278-331) can be summarized by the formula “new comparative psychoanalysis”, and the perspective that these pages advocate is concisely described in the title of the penultimate part of the book: “international psychoanalysis” and “international identity”.
As a researcher with a solid historical methodology, Conci compares the documents he studies with the contexts, the personalities and the human groups they come from and belong to. As the reading proceeds, one can clearly see that what is “new” in his perspective comes from his habit of dealing with the literature of the present day with the same attention and cautiousness that historians devote to archives. The histories that are read here are not the type of hagiographic and apologetic narratives that Gramsci named “fetishistic history” (because the research is historicist and sees “the chicken in the fertilized egg”). In these pages, the past is an unforeseeable archive, full