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To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death , the journal La Cultura (, 1) has dedicated an entire issue exclusively to Freud. As the editors Bedeschi and Trincia point out in their introduction, the essays included deal with various aspects of Freud's thought, and examine it from numerous perspectives: from the aesthetic point of view to the anthropological one, from its religious aspects to its socio-political and epistemological ones. In their preface, the editors raise the problem of the relationship between philosophy and the behavioural sciences, including psychoanalysis unhesitatingly among these, and expressing their hopes that this volume will give rise to some debate about the subject.
Of the essays included in the issue, the one by Trincia on Freud's religiousness and atheism is interesting, as is Nannini's piece on Freud and anthropology, which sees the revolutionary nature of psychoanalysis in “the new way of looking at man and his world”, rather than in Totem and Taboo. It should be borne in mind, says Nannini, that this revolution is already an integral part of contemporary anthropology.
Pinelli's essay on Freud's biography by Peter Gay is also worth reading. The same cannot be said of Roberto Levi's essay “The Scientificity of Psychoanalysis”. One notices a kind of obsession with scientificity, an unfortunate sign of the times we live in, characterized by insecurity and the search for an image. When this book was presented at the Gramsci Institute, Sini quite rightly suggested that Freud possessed the integrity of the nineteenth-century scientist, similar to that of Darwin, in which rigour and dedication were intrinsic parts of scientific research. The present-day obsession with scientificity, on the other hand, sees the philosopher as being better off: at least he knows that his discourse has no “testable”