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The history of psychoanalysis as a dialogical, interpersonal project - in its professional and social as well as its clinical dimensions - cannot be presented straightforwardly. It can't be aligned into sequences of filiation radiating from the major founding names (the Freudian, Kleinian or Lacanian ‘line’), or framed by particular institutional perspectives. Rather it subverts and exceeds the received historiography of the movement. This is the message that could be blazoned across the opening of Marco Conci's exceptional book: an anthology of papers, an international colloquy, a Bildungsroman of his own clinical education, and a manifesto for an alternative narrative of the whole psychoanalytic development. It comes with an impressively international range of plaudits from psychoanalysts and historians alike - Stefano Bolognini, Ulrike May, Andrea Sabbadini, Peter L. Rudnytsky, Carlo Bonomi, Henry Zvi Lothane and many others. Conci is a well-liked and well-connected figure: historian, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, coeditor-in-chief of Psychoanalytic Forum, member of the German and Italian psychoanalytic societies and the IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association), and affiliated as well to the APsaA (American Psychoanalytic Association), and the William Alanson White Society.
But the transformational force of the book's argument for changing the way we write psychoanalysis as a discipline - above all, away from the showcase of big names and key concepts and towards mutuality (what matters is ‘not the temporal priority of a concept’ but ‘the fact of there being one or more colleagues setting to themselves the same questions and coming to similar (or different) answers’ [p. 384]; ‘the development of our talents best takes place through a systematic interaction with all those with whom we can collaborate and from whom we can learn’ [p. 626]) - is not immediately apparent. Its radical propositions are rather