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Francesco Bisagni is an Italian psychiatrist who trained as a Jungian analyst in Italy and as a child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic in London. As a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis Francesco Bisagni is very committed to analysis: he belongs to a committee of child analysts who are working at establishing a Jungian child training with Kleinian and Winnicottian components in Italy. In this context Bisagni's book offers itself as a valuable contribution to thinking about what analysis has to offer to our society, specifically to the children and adolescents of our modern world and to their parents. This is not a scientific book, although clinical material and theoretical psychoanalytical concepts of different schools of thought are discussed and compared. With mercurial playfulness Bisagni challenges and turns his theoretical background upside-down, transforming his work with his young patients into something new: poetic stories of real horror and suffering in which the suffering and horror are described psychoanalytically in a new idiom.
Suzanne Maiello, in her beautifully written prologue to the book, reveals that Bisagni is also a poet as well as a writer. This double identity of Bisagni, as Maiello suggests, offers perhaps the key that opens this book, as if the analyst had passed the pen to the writer who is better suited and better equipped when writing about psychoanalytical theories and their connection to human suffering. ‘As an analyst I cannot but write stories’ (p. 65), says the writer who, different from the author, benefits from ‘poetic licence’. In these stories analysis becomes a refuge, an encounter with a life-giving source, a light that illuminates. Life and light go together, and psychoanalysis works like photosynthesis in the internal world of these child patients. Trapped by trauma, ignorance, trans-generational trauma, parental denial, avoidance and intrusion, they are waiting for the oxygen that m