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The Istituto di Neuropsichiatria Infantile dell'-Università Statale di Roma runs a psychoanalytic psychotherapy service which deals with the most serious cases of psychosis and autistic defects in mental development. For many years, the psychoanalytic psychotherapists who work there, and the school they were trained in, have profited from Frances Tustin's seminars. But Giannotti, a psychoanalyst and professor of Child Psychiatry, and De Astis, a psychologist and psychotherapist, have evolved their own way of working. Although their theories and techniques have been influenced by Mahler, Winnicott and Gaddini, they have developed their own ideas, which become apparent as we read the chapters in this book.
In 1930, when she begun her analysis of Dick, Klein wrote that the diagnosis and treatment of child psychosis is one of the main tasks of the psychoanalysis of children. We must acknowledge that the authors have not only carried out this task with great success—achieving remarkable results with 39 psychotic children—as Tustin reported with satisfaction in 1983, but they have also managed to establish psychoanalysis in the unpredictable environment of the Università Statale. Some people, myself included, will be sorry to see that they have achieved their results with basically non-Kleinian methods and procedures, but with regard to Giannotti and De Astis, we may cite what Dicks said about the Tavistock Clinic in London: 'the Clinic's doctrine was to have no doctrine, only aims: to treat, understand more and teach one's own work'. Such an attitude is more pragmatic than doctrinaire, even though it involves a certain risk of appearing syncretic.
In De Astis and Giannotti's experience, mental life is based on a fluent sense of continuity between mother and child, as well as between mind and body, the intra-uterine and the extra-uterine (the latter was already emphasized by Freud in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, and taken up by Bion); and it is this experience