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Francesco Bisagni is a psychiatrist, Jungian adult analyst and Tavistock-trained child and adolescent psychoanalyst who has written a remarkable book on his long-term work with severely obsessional child, adolescent and adult analysands. Working with these patients in mostly four to five times weekly analysis over many years, he has focused on the impact of infantile trauma on the symbolic function (the capacity to play, dream and imagine) and on the micro-analytic exploration of the transference/countertransference relationship. The analysands he describes often suffer from severely obsessional patterns of thought, feelings and behaviour that have led to impasses in their emotional and interpersonal development, and from a Jungian standpoint have led to foreclosures in their capacity for inner freedom and imagination and frozen developmental and individuation processes.
The first section of the book explores in a comprehensive manner current models and perspectives on the treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorders (OCD). A chapter is devoted to psychoanalytic thought on obsessions with an interesting discussion of the relationship between obsessional defences/ functioning/structure and depression, phobic symptoms and magical and delusional thinking. A thorough discussion of Freud's work on obsessional neuroses focuses on intra-psychic defence operations, and this along with a discussion of Freud's case of the Rat Man provides a useful foundation for Bisagni's analytic perspective. Bion's work on transformations provides another important scaffolding for Bisagni's work as he relies on this model to describe significant aspects of his analytical attitude. Bisagni utilizes Bion's model of transformations in mental states that move from O, the unknown, to K, the knowledge we can have of O.
Transformations are also influenced by the emotional links of L, love, and H, hate that link the analyst and analysand in their inter-subjective relationship and which through the ana