Contents & abstracts




Theory and Technique

Carbone Tirelli L. In memory of Giuliana Lisa Milana. An introduction to “Sexuality in M.

Klein’s Thinking”. Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 1-4.


Milana GL. Sexuality in M. Klein’s Thinking. Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 5-19.


The author offers a careful close examination of how Melanie Klein’s thinking on infantile sexuality evolved. She dwells on the relationship between pre-genital and genital instincts and the conception of the Oedipal complex that results from that: a conception that differs from Sigmund Freud’s thinking. According to M. Klein, experiences of desire, love and anxiety converge in genitality and it is the emotional elements that govern the world of instincts: in this sense, the libido feels the effect of object relations rather than determining them. Sexual curiosity appears to be an expression of the epistemophilic instinct, understood as a wide-ranging need of knowledge that is closely linked to the forms of anguish the child experiences and that are proper to the schizo-paranoid or depressive position. The author pays particular attention to how M. Klein’s thinking gradually distanced itself from the approach that attached greater importance to sexual phenomena than to purely affective-mental ones. This distancing laid the foundations for subsequent developments in psychoanalytic theory.


Focus

Family Configurations in Our Times


Balducci P. Introduction. Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 20-26.


The author presents the articles collected in the “Focus” section with the intention of providing a more up-to-date view of research conducted on parenthood in light of the profound social and cultural changes that we are witnessing. The article explores some of the questions psychoanalysts find themselves facing when they turn their gaze to forms of families that challenge common thinking, such as families with same-sex parents and single-parent families. The author shows how research on filiation and parental functions in non-traditional family contexts necessarily requires psychotherapists to rethink both their own clinical practice and the theoretical cornerstones.

Lucarelli D. Same-Sex Parenthood: A Contribution from a Psychoanalytical Perspective. Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 27-41.


The article asks what influences the changes in family realities are having on the shaping of psychoanalytic theory and whether psychoanalysis is capable of accommodating advancing novelties within its theoretico-clinical framework. Such questioning is a work that currently needs to be done in the psychoanalytical field, in an attempt to seek new responses to reality’s new situations. Before embarking on an in-depth examination of same-sex parenthood, the article dwells on the themes of gender identity and homosexuality and also makes some references to the themes of psychosexuality and the Oedipal complex. Various authors’ opinions on the subjects of homosexuality and same-sex parenthood are taken into consideration.



Priori M. Storks, Cabbages and Egg-Mummies: Maternal Elements that Haunt Gay Parent Couples. Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 42-55.


Families with same-sex parents are now a fairly widespread reality in Western societies and gay couples who start a family using gestational surrogacy encounter particular difficulties precisely by virtue of the fact that the maternal element operates outside the parent couple. The author takes therapeutic work with a young male homosexual to show the painful journey in psychic suffering that led the protagonist to create his own family. Alongside the story of the therapy, the author proposes those themes through which psychoanalysis is called to face these new family realities.



Fondi E., Lana N. “Who Gave Me To You?” Psychoanalytical Reflections on Single Parenthood. Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 56-68.


The authors reflect on the intrapsychic dynamics and the fantasies underpinning the desire for motherhood in single women who resort to heterologous medically assisted reproduction. Material taken from clinical practice and infant observation is used to emphasise the complexity of the filiation journey resulting from recourse to single and/or double gamete donation. Frequently, after an initial period of idealising the experience of motherhood, the woman finds herself facing the process of her child’s separation and individuation and the unavoidable questions about his/her origins that that raises. It is precisely at this point that single mothers may seek psychotherapeutic support in reformulating their parenting journey.


Clinical Reflections

Giusti M. Musical Rêverie: Vitality in Psychotherapeutic Experience and Communication.

Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 69-85.


Partly aided by the contribution that clinical examples can offer, the author seeks to describe a particular form of rêverie. In this article, the term “musical rêverie” is used to refer to the analytic use of the musical thoughts (and emotional experiences they elicit) emerging in the here-and-now of the therapeutic relationship. The author then goes on to describe musical rêverie’s possible transformative outcomes and emphasizes the implications it may have for the vitality of communication with the patient. Lastly, he describes the inherent difficulties in the processes involved in such transformations, emphasising - within a Bionian perspective - how the same object (that of the specific musical thought, in this case) can be used either for defensive and evacuative purposes or for explorative ones.


Therapeutic Communities and Day Centres for Minors

Quintiliani R. Therapeutic Communities for Adolescents. Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 86-88.


Bencivenga C. Group Vicissitudes and Developmental Processes in a Therapeutic Community for Adolescents: Necessary Cross-Contamination Between Team and Patients. Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 89-100.


Communities for adolescents offer the opportunity - through the dynamics that guest users are able to generate - to observe certain phenomena that, if identified, are capable of triggering therapeutic developmental processes. The hypothesis is that the “patients group”, the “professionals group” and the whole group in its totality - united in a single field, which is that of the community institution - move at the same pace, “spurred” to relive the problematic junction-points of development. It can happen that a patient sets a personal mental structure above that of the group, imposing mental and emotional elements by virtue of which the group and the individual become indistinguishable in a silent, “mute” zone in the professionals’ minds. This zone remains “mute” until there is a decodifying, interpretative intervention that can “shed light” by working backwards through the network of transferential and counter-transferential processes.


The Enchanting Screen

Gentile A. Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas). Richard & Piggle, 30, 1, 2022, 101-104.


Reviews