You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As one who teaches, and is convinced of, the need for instinct theory in the understanding of psychic life and the resolution of its pathology, I would not have ordinarily paid much attention to a new volume which did not conform to my idea of what is in the growing edge of psychoanalysis. This growing edge, for me, would generally include writers of the Kleinian and of the object relations orientations. This confession is not made out of any particular urge to seek absolution, but rather as a personal testimony to what I believe to be a widespread phenomenon of narrowness of interest on the part of so many psychoanalysts.
It is, then, a refreshing discovery for one with an instinct and objectrelations bias to find a volume by an author who is an ideological follower of Sullivan and Horney which is stimulating, provocative, and clinically useful. It is a volume of collected papers by a man whose need is not only to know, but to know knowing itself, for it is the cognitive aspect of the inner psychic life that is one of the major preoccupations of this author.
Silvano Arieti, the editor, is known, or should be known, to every psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. This volume presents an opportunity to know Arieti the clinician, the theorist, the creative thinker. A journey through its pages reveals an erudite and catholic mind working through astute clinical observations on a broad collection of psychopathology. All of this is reported lucidly, and with admirable economy of style. One is thereby led, among other impressions, to appreciate the qualities that a good psychiatric editor must possess.
The title of this volume is a testimony to the scope of the author's psychoanalytic interests as well as his refreshing absence of undue modesty. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Silvano Arieti has much to be immodest about. The selected papers in this volume are a sample of Arieti's writings dating from his early work with schizophrenics in a state hospital in the 1950's to his cont