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This is a challenging book to read, one that gives the reader pause to reflect on his or her own theoretical orientation toward many
of the fundamental issues raised in the course of the author's argument. Ferrari is well known as psychoanalyst and author in Brazil and Italy. Although two chapters were written in collaboration —one with L. Carbone Tirelli on extensions of Ferrari's basic theory, and another with F. Romano on clinical applications of the theory—Ferrari is the primary author, and his ideas provide the guiding inspiration for the book. A useful glossary of theoretical terms is provided by Romano and S. Facchini. In addition, helpful and clarifying exposition is provided by R. D. Hinshelwood in the introduction, which offers the reader a more readily accessible approach to an otherwise complex and at times difficult-to-follow theory.
On first opening the book, I found myself enthused by the projected enterprise, namely, of articulating a psychoanalytic theory that specifically embraces the physicality of the body as central to analytic theory and to the basic understanding of the mind, an approach I have tried to formulate separately on my own. I enthusiastically welcome this objective, since I have argued that the neglect of the body as an integral component of the analytic subject—which seems pervasive in current analytic conceptualizing—is a serious theoretical omission that stands in the way of a more comprehensive analytic theory and of the potential integration of analytic orientations to the mind with other areas of parallel scientific interest, particularly the rapidly advancing neurosciences.
My enthusiasm was dampened somewhat, however, by what seems to me a twofold impediment to successfully accomplishing this effort in From the Eclipse of the Body. The first difficulty (at least for me) arises from the all-to-close adherence to a Kleinian and Bionian frame of reference, and the second is the persistence of what seems an outdated dualism of t