This oddly constructed, slender volume grew out of a 1993 symposium organized by the editors of the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, the official journal of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society. Its stated purpose was to discuss the peculiar arduousness of psychoanalytic writing. But its publication in book form is intended to redress a “partial aphasia” (p. viii) afflicting Italian analysts who are inundated with literary imports and wish to gain wider circulation of their domestic efforts in the international community of psychoanalytic readers.

While the reader can infer from the scope and charm of the papers assembled here that the symposium must have been a wonderfully