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The book starts with a citation from Paul Klee:
The contrast between man´s ideological capacity to move at random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is the origin of all human tragedy. It is this contrast between power and prostration that implies the duality of human existence. Half-winged – half-imprisoned, this is man!
The book consists of Introduction and 10 chapters plus a Conclusion with the tittle ‘Art, Bodily experiences and internal harmony’. Most of the chapters are published previously as articles in dominant psychoanalytic journals, but the book has been edited so well that it is a rather compact and readable on its own.
The topic of the first chapter is body-mind dissociation and transference onto the body, the second chapter deals with Bion´s earliest psychosomatic intuitions. The topic of the third chapter is intersubjectivity and the body and in the fourth chapter Lombardi formulates his personal view of Armando Ferrari´s concept concrete original object. Fifth and seventh chapters deal with analytic sessions. In sixth chapter Lombardi studies body-mind dissociation in adolescence. In eighth and tenth chapters he deals the theme of the book and music. In ninth chapter Lombardi comes back to thoughts of Bion and Ferrari. Thus, taken together, Lombardi elaborates his theme in a rich and many-sided way. The book has much practical clinical material, but also theoretical thinking around the theme and clinical reality is worth reading.
Lombardi emphasizes bodily sensations and the changes in bodily states, which are some kind of seeds of thoughts. The formless is looking for form. He follows Bion (1962/2013), who writes about this process in following way:
It is convenient to regard thinking as dependent on the successful outcome of two main mental developments. The first is the development of thoughts. They require an apparatus to cope with them. The second development, therefore, is of this apparatus that I shall provisi