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The work of Eugenio Gaddini is inadequately known in North America. A distinguished pioneer in the Italian psychoanalytic movement, he devoted a lifetime of research to the organization of infantile mental life and its effects on adult personality organization. His work is of signal importance to the understanding of psychosomatic disorders and phenomena. The richness and breadth of Gaddini's original thinking combined with his extensive
research and clinical acumen make impossible an adequate brief review of this information-laden and tantalizing book.
This edited collection of papers is primarily from his vast Scritti, a work of over 800 pages. Adam Limentani has selected those covering three main themes: imitation, seen by Gaddini as a central factor in early development; ego formation, the processes of instinctual drive arousal and the development of awareness of separateness from the object; and the way the body becomes meaningful to the mind through the elaboration of primitive defensive fantasies. Gaddini's formulations are novel and demand speculative interest, however much one subscribes or does not subscribe to the drive-energic framework.
This review will be limited to brief discussion of “On Imitation” (1969), “Early Defensive Fantasies and the Psychoanalytical Process,” (1981), and “Formation of the Father and the Primal Scene” (1977).
Most interesting of all to this reviewer is Gaddini's ascribing paramount importance to the growing human organism's earliest sensory experiences and protofantasies in the evolution of personality structure. In one of Gaddini's last recorded remarks, he noted that the primitive perceptions described by Fenichel were truly sensations and that the movements from sensations to perceptions led him to understand the importance of mental development in relation to the early, primitive body development. He was also impressed with the extent to which the development of bodily functions conditions the mind, creating models of funct