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The collection of essays that make up this volume was published in Italy at almost the same time as the book appeared in England, not only thanks to the bonds of friendship and esteem existing between numerous Italian psychoanalysts and Amedeo Limentani, the only honorary member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, but also because the subjects the author has been studying now for almost thirty years are of great topical interest.
Significantly, the book owes its title to a paper which had its first reading in Italy, at the multiple seminar Convention in Bologna in 1983. The lively autobiographical nature of this paper allows Limentani to place all the essays that follow it within an appropriate framework, both from the point of view of the theoretical developments his professional training was formed around, and from the point of view of the historical and human events taking place within the English psychoanalytical movement (and consequently, within the international one) in the same lapse of time. After this introductory chapter, the essays are arranged in a strictly chronological order, the one best suited to demonstrating how the author's thoughts evolved as his experience developed. But there is no danger of the earlier works seeming obsolete, since Limentani has taken the wise precaution of adding detailed postscripts to some of them to bring them up to date.
The second chapter is devoted to an essay first drafted in 1964, about the myth of Orpheus in the light of the problems of ambivalence and reparation arising from the Oedipal situation. Apart from the style of the piece, which is startlingly reminiscent of the classic structure of many of Freud's works, it provides an immediate, striking example of how the Kleinian concept of reparation can be applied to an Oedipal situation conceived in classical Freudian terms