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Francesco Bisagni, Nadia Fina and Caterina Vezzoli, all training analysts at CIPA (Centro Italiano Psicologia Analytica) have succeeded in bringing together a cornucopia of distinctive Italian papers with additional contributions from Jean Knox, Hester McFarland Solomon, George Hogenson and, in the child and adolescent section, Gustav Bovensiepen, Brian Feldman and Brigitte Allain-Dupré.
The authors set out to demonstrate the fertile influence of Jung's theories and their relevance to current psychoanalytic practice and research. This is a vast and demanding task and inevitably some of the papers struggle to remain within the confines of Jung's theories. The pitfall comes when a contemporary hermeneutic reading is projected onto theories from an earlier Zeitgeist. The psychoanalytic community of today lives in interesting times poised on the cusp of a major paradigm shift and has to be prepared to sacrifice or revise some cherished tenets whilst other more obscure ones might re-emerge to coalesce with new findings from the neurosciences, philosophy and anthropology. Bisagni, Fina and Vezzoli identify a shift from traditional psychoanalytic paradigms towards a new paradigm of complexity. Most writers identify the common unifying theme as a shift towards a relational model and a move from Oedipal interpretations to affect regulation and the co-creation of meaning.
The papers present Jung seen through a different cultural lens. Most contributors refer to psychology in the classical Jungian sense rather than what is now common practice in Anglo-Saxon academia. The editors preface the volumes with a general statement that Jungian concepts have been widely recognized and integrated into modern psychology. This might be specific to the Italian scene as it would hardly be recognized as a valid proposition for current clinical psychology. The authors succinctly trace the ancestral influences from Freud, Klein, Bion, Fordham and Bick, among others, and demonstrate how their thi