Prendersi in gioco. Una psicoanalista racconta [Making Fun of Oneself. A Psychoanalyst Tells Her Story], by Marta Badoni, Milan,  Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2023,  177 pp., €20 (paperback), ISBN: 9788832855050

In their introduction to the book Prendersi in gioco, Stefania Nicasi and Alessia Fusilli De Camillis write,

Prendersi in gioco is a distillation of Marta Badoni’s experience as a child neuropsychiatrist and a senior member and training analyst in the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI), of which she has been National Secretary and Vice-President. The psychoanalyst recounts her personal story in a close interweaving of biographical, clinical, and institutional narratives. (xi)

I would like to use this as the starting point of my review because, as well as being a concise and thorough introduction to the author, it notes how one of the book’s substantial characteristics is this highly stimulating “interweaving” of different interconnected and mutually sustaining spheres. Rather like a personal travel diary, it is capable of prompting the reader into an individual focus on clinical, theoretical, and technical panoramas and educational and institutional experience: a “psychoanalytic treatise in a condensed form, but one of great clarity and depth”, as Giuseppe Di Chiara1 has called it. It is a “distillation of experience”, a “legacy for those who have time and inclination to draw upon it” (x), as the author herself calls it, one that unfolds in an “open, dynamic, and problematising” form (xii) – a “distillation of experience” that also, in its freedom of thought and the right doses of lightness and depth, its “flashes of intuition and blazing summaries” (xx), recalls features of writings by Nina Coltart, a psychoanalyst able to fuse personal and professional experience into a form of thought where, as in the essence of Marta Badoni’s work, what stands out as central is respect for the freedom of the subject. A respect for the other’s freedom to be himself or herself as parent, child, adult, pupil is the guiding principle of Prendersi in gioco and is combined with