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This book is the fruit of work carried out by our colleagues C. Neri, L. Pallier, G. Petacchi, G. C. Soavi and R. Tagliacozzo who, in the course of the last decade have, as a group, presented their ideas to us at the Congresses of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society in Taormina , Rome , Milan and Sorrento .
On such occasions, the authors outlined to us, in fieri, the results emerging from their research. This fact caught our attention: the possibility of travelling along the same route together, while remaining fully in possession of our own personal characteristics and free of any rigid or pre-defined structure. This fact alone enabled us to profit much from what these colleagues of ours had to say. But this book provides us with another opportunity to read in summary the ideas that were submitted to us during those years.
The title of the book and its introduction inform us that out of various themes, Unpredictability, Curiosity, Fusionality, Rejection and Acceptance, it was Fusionality that the Authors were most interested in investigating.
It is an area that refers us back to the earliest stages of mental and bodily life, which involves many of the mechanisms at work in the first object relationships, and which when applied to the level of the analytic relationship implies the need to pay close attention to highly complex and sophisticated forms of communication, both verbal and nonverbal. We are warned in the very first pages: it is a fantasy characterised by the expectation that it will be spontaneously shared. In the analytic relationship fusionality manifests itself in a variety of ways including fantasies, anxieties, defences and violent breaks. Certain key words recur in the various chapters of the book — apart from