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The publication of a book by Marcella Balconi on drawing and child psychoanalysis had been eagerly awaited by all those of my own generation and others, who, during the 40 years or so she has spent working in the field of child neuropsychiatry with a psychoanalytic bias, have had the chance to collaborate with and learn from her, and who have always admired her as a pioneer and loved her as a teacher; and the very recollection of those heroic times, when child psychiatry was still largely based on the use of tests, calls to mind an example of her passion and originality in this specific field; namely the proposal she made in the fifties of getting children to draw their responses to Düss's famous fairy tales, which enabled a great deal of enlightening research material to be gathered.
I hope therefore that I will not incur the wrath of the co-author of the work, Professor Giulia Del Carlo Giannini, if I neglect somewhat her brilliant and comprehensive contributions, as A.M. Galdo does in her preface.
The book is made up of a series of essays written by the two authors, who set out to investigate the earliest infantile experiences, basing their research on drawings produced by seriously disturbed children (whom, although we dislike labels, we might term psychotic, with predominantly autistic but also symbiotic modes of behaviour) during courses of psychotherapy begun before the onset of the latency period. The leitmotiv running through these essays is the study and close examination of the child's primitive experiences and the search for a deeper understanding of them in their relationship with the part-objects - the mother's mouth, nipple, breast or face - in an attempt to describe the shift from primary images which are fixed in the unconscious and emerge in the child's drawings as an expression of primitive sensations, to emotional experiences, in short to emotions, and subsequently to thoughts; the theoretical