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Evolutive Ruptures. Psychoanalysis of Breakdowns and Defensive Solutions is a book that, already from its title, presents a distinct originality and precise theoretical connotation, with considerable consequent effects on the clinical and technical implications dealt with in its constituent chapters.
The title of the volume in fact expresses what may seem at face value to be an oxymoron, as it aligns two terms in apparent antithesis: the first refers to the fracture of an object’s intactness (since it implies serious damage to the structure) or alternatively to the interruption of a bond, of a relationship; the other term instead, in its most literal meaning, refers to the concept of progress, of development, of unfolding.
In reality this antinomy intercepts and transmits – and herein lies the originality of this generous contribution dedicated to adolescence and its typical psychopathological manifestations – the dialectic tension, implicit in the concept of the evolutive breakdown, between a destructive drive that produces a solution of continuity in the mental functioning of a subject in development, and psychic movement that is in a certain measure orderly and directed towards a creative finale. Such a tension is the thread, clearly evident, that winds through all the theoretical considerations illustrated in the diverse chapters of the book, vividly supported by an exhaustive clinical exemplification.
I have begun this review with this apparently irreconcilable antinomy – comparable in a certain sense to the tectonic clash between two continental masses, infancy and adulthood, or the psychotic and neurotic parts of the personality – to highlight how the spirit that permeates Anna Maria Nicolò’s work is in itself authentically psychoanalytic; in fact, all of Freud’s teachings of knowing how to transform obstacles and disturbances along the bumpy path of psychoanalytic research in successive theoretical and technical cardinal turning points move in this same directi