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Since the time of Emilio Servadio's 1935 article ‘Psychoanalyse und Telepathie’, the topic of the book under review represents one of the most original contributions of Italian psychoanalysis, as it was further developed by a whole series of authors, including - among others - Eugenio Gaddini (1965) and Elvio Fachinelli (1983). It is true that Freud shared with Edoardo Weiss , the first Italian psychoanalyst, not only his interest in telepathy but also the secret of having analysed his own daughter, Anna (see Weiss, 1991). But, since unconscious communication and ‘thought transference’ (the English translation of Freud's term Gedankenübertragung) remain such complex and problematic topics, they were not specifically covered in the 738-page anthology Reading Italian Psychoanalysis, edited in 2016 by Franco Borgogno, Alberto Luchetti and Luisa Marino Coe.
In 2010, the Italian analyst Maria Pierri published the original and important article ‘Coincidences in Analysis: Sigmund Freud and the Strange Case of Dr Forsyth and Herr von Vorsicht’ in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. In it she included the English translation of the German transcription (made by Ernest Falzeder) of the original notes on Mr P. (alias ‘Herr von Vorsicht’) written by Freud in 1921 under the title ‘Nachtrag’ (Postscript), which had never been published before. Freud did not in fact avail himself of such a Postscript in the report of the case which he gave in ‘Lecture 30’ of the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in 1933 under the title ‘Dreams and Occultism’, and James Strachey could not include it in the Standard Edition, because it had unaccountably (sic) been lost. Thanks to her fascination with the problem of unconscious communication and telepathy in clinical work, and to her interest in the history of psychoanalysis, Pierri had the good luck to be able to find Freud's ‘Nachtrag’ in the Freud Archives of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC in 2006. At this point, Ilse