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It has been my intention for several years to review in the Rivista di Psicoanalisi those Italian texts of psychiatry referring to psychoanalysis: following the works by De Martis and Zapparoli and their collaborators of some years back (I was unfortunately preceeded by a colleague quicker than me in reviewing the recent Correale's book), this volume, edited by Antonio Brignone, who is at the same time author or co-author of all the chapters, seems to me to merit attention.
It is perhaps particularly interesting that Brignone and his collaborators did not have a psychoanalytic training and therefore do not belong to the ranks of those psychoanalysts who are also psychiatrists, as is the case of the above mentioned authors; this seems to indicate the continued attention paid to psychoanalysis by psychiatrists who are not psychoanalysts. It seems from the text that the authors started off, like many others, from experience in the anti-institutional movement in Italy and from “that great laboratory that the national psychiatric services have been over the last fifteen years”, and have gradually discovered how psychiatry in the area of the national health service makes it possible to gather together many of the different ways that exist of viewing psychic suffering from the vertex of the relationship between professional carers and patients. The transition from the mental hospital to a national psychiatric service is characterised by the “appearance of a closeness between patient and his carer which never existed beforehand” and which facilitates the construction of “a meaningful relationship between professional carers and patient”. It becomes a “therapeutic relationship” when it “makes it possible for the patient to recognise and make contact with his disturbing behaviour and the ill parts of his self as they are expressed in his relationship with the carers”.