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As the editors say in their Premise, this book is “the result of research carried out by the study-group on War, fear and security which was founded in 1986 and investigates problems related to war and peace”. Furio Cerutti's article Quali ricerche su guerra e pace? (What Sort of Research on War and Peace?) acts as an introduction to the book. Cerutti explains that the subtitle is meant to indicate more of a “vectorial progression from the pluridisciplinary to the interdisciplinary level” rather than the achievement of integrated knowledge. The starting point of the investigation remains however the awareness that no individual discipline is able to explain the whole of the phenomenon under examination.
Having said that, the book is interesting in many ways, raises a wealth of questions and prompts reflection precisely because it enables the reader to form various, and apparently incompatible images of the object under investigation. Since, looking at things from a psychoanalytic perspective, a problem can arise precisely out of the conflict between the ego's tendency to integrate and synthesise and the incongruity of the images of the object. For example, it is not easy to put Grazia Attili's chapter on Genesi ed ontogenesi della cooperazione: l'approccio evoluzionistico (The Genesis and Ontogenesis of Cooperation: the Evolutionary Approach) together mentally with the chapters by Parthenope Bion Talamo or Giovanni Hautmann. And yet, if we start out from the idea that it should be possible to combine or integrate the ideas of one with those of the other, we feel the incentive to seek a configuration (an Auffassung in the Freudian sense) which both tolerates their co-existence and appreciates the difference between them.
For this reason it may seem paradoxical that this review concentrates on the chapters by the two psychoanalysts who contributed to the book. But a review of the whole book would inevitably imply giving