You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Nine Italian psychoanalysts, members of the Milanese Centre for Psychoanalysis, a branch of the Italian Psychoanalytic Association, present in this book their reflections about the dialogue between patient and analyst in their joint efforts to find understanding of the analysand's psychic suffering. Following their individual analytic paths, they have come to share a similar approach to the psychoanalytic relationship without forming a particular school of thought. The authors converge in conceiving of psychoanalysis “as a meeting place between two people involved in a relationship from which creative developments are expected” (p. xxii). They focus “attention on both members of the couple,” considering that “the relationship that grows up between them becomes the real ‘object’ of their research.” (ibid.).
The essays cover three main themes: the analytic relationship and dialogue (hence the title of the book), the analyst's mind, and some clinical situations. The authors believe that “the patient's associations are responses to the analyst's interventions” (p. xxiii). Such conviction requires that the field of analytic observation be enlarged to include the analyst's mental processes and actions and the events between patient and analyst.
The authors share a belief about the dynamic motivations of the human mind: “Every human being is from the very beginning in search of the Other, and in the relationship with that Other he constructs