Contents & abstracts



Theory and Technique
S.Oliva. A Presentation of Phyllis Greenacre’s “The Childhood of the Artist – Libidinal
Phase Development and Giftedness”. Richard e Piggle, 24, 2, 2016, 93-97.

P. Greenacre. The Childhood of the Artist – Libidinal Phase Development and Giftedness. Richard & Piggle, 24, 2, 2016, 98-118.

The author illustrates how the child who will become an artist is immediately gifted (and more so than a normal child) with a remarkable, heightened sensory sensitivity in relation to his/her mother’s body. This sensitivity is transferred, during the course of development, to collective alternates, thus initiating a sort of love affair with the world that will push the person to high-level creation. Particularly significant are all those sensations of vigour and awe characteristic of the phallic phase of libidinal development that are described with a special intensity by some particularly gifted individuals: they are connected to artistic inspiration.

Focus
Narrative about Childhood: between Autobiography and Literature.
Psychoanalytical Reflections

L. Iannotta. Psychoanalysis and Literature: Do “We Draw from the Same Source and Work Upon the Same Object”? Richard & Piggle, 24, 2, 2016, 119-123.

A. Ginzburg. Childhood Memories and Bi-logical Structures of Narration. Richard & Piggle, 24, 2, 2016, 124-144.

What connects a literary text’s formal and stylistic choices to its author? The hypothesis developed here proposes – in the light of Ignacio Matte Blanco’s theories regarding the functioning of the unconscious – that there exists an indestructible connection between emotion and artistic creation. The childhood autobiographies written by Stendhal, Saba and Perec reveal the presence of thematic and stylistic constants that characterise all the works of these authors. In short, a model of reading that suggests a possible extension of the psychoanalytic perspective in relation to works of art.


E. Zinato. “Looking Up” and “Looking Back”. Perspective on Childhood in the Twentieth-century Italian Novel. Richard & Piggle, 24, 2, 2016, 145-157.

The article analyses and interprets those novels by Svevo, Gadda, Calvino, Meneghello and Morante that have variously represented childhood. Thanks to the teaching of Francesco Orlando, the theorist who has most used Freud’s teaching in the reading of literary texts, two different forms of representation are hypothesised: the first being a consequence of the hermeneutic importance of childhood after the spread of psychoanalysis and the second, datable from the end of the 1950s onwards, being a consequence of Italy’s traumatic modernization. In the first, it is the child’s alienating “looking up” at adult ways that prevails whereas, in the second, it is the narrator’s nostalgic “looking back” both at him/herself as a child and at an individual and collective age (perceived as lost) that dominates.


M. Marsilio. Child Imaginations in Prose Works from the 2000s. Richard & Piggle, 24, 2, 2016, 158-167.

The article takes the form of a close examination of how children’s imaginations were represented in Italian narratives during the 2000s. Written in a didactic, literary-criticism key and starting with two contemporary novels, Simona Vinci’s A Game We Play (2000) and Giorgio Vasta’s Time on My Hands (English edition out in 2017), the work highlights the “difficulty of growing up” experienced by the books’ preadolescent protagonists. The latter, united in strict, closed “tribal” groups, enact games – genuine rites of passage – through which they seek to make their own the experiences, par excellence, of adult life: sex and violence. In assuming the protagonist children’s perspective, the two narrative texts reveal not only the complex and tragic ways in which it is a submissive and subordinate imitation of models borrowed from the media (pornographic magazines and the television images of the Moro kidnapping, respectively) that prevail in the games but also the consequent desertification of emotions in contemporary instances of sentimental education.


M. A. Lucariello. The Multi-dimensional Nature of the Relationship between Literature and Psychoanalysis. Richard & Piggle, 24, 2, 2016, 168-175.

The author proposes some starting points for reflection on the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis and, more specifically, on twentieth-century Italian narrative and the position that Freud maintained throughout his life regarding the function of art as a means of knowing the soul’s innermost movements. An existential crisis has an impact on literary production. It also provokes literary critics to reflect on methods of textual and global interpretation, through the use of interpretative categories that have been borrowed from psychoanalytic thinking. Such an interweaving of literature, criticism and psychoanalysis testifies to the great fruitfulness of an approach that takes account of the valences of language – that bridge over to the world of the infinite existing in thought, emotions and memory – for the purposes of re-discovering and analysing both the aesthetic object and the psychoanalytic object.


Clinical Reflections
M. Sapio, L. Ciampa, R. Guadagnini, A. G. Olivares and M. Pucci. Between Paternal Function
and Real Father during Adolescence: A Sewing Together. Richard & Piggle, 24, 2, 2016, 176-184.

After examining the paternal functions most specifically involved during a son’s adolescence, the authors dwell on the transformations in the father-daughter relationship that are induced by the daughter’s puberty, as they may be deduced from the clinical material furnished. They conclude by hypothesizing an optimal primary role for the father of adolescents, namely that of being a “sufficiently inadequate object”.

Bookmark