Contents & abstracts

Editorial

Theory and technique

Dias EO. Winnicott’s Theory of the Maturational Processes as a Guide to Clinical Practice. Richard & Piggle, 33, 2, 2025, 113-125.

Taking as its basis the Winnicottian view that the nature of a disorder depends on its specific origination point along the personal development timeline, this study sets out to demonstrate that Winnicott’s theory of the maturational processes can be used as a theoretical horizon for clinical diagnosis and as an irreplaceable guide for clinical work. First of all, the author presents the essential premises that shape the theory before outlining their principal features. She then succinctly presents the simplest classification: the one most commonly formulated by Winnicott, this includes psychosis, forms of depression and neurosis. Lastly, by way of example, she demonstrates how a disorder that is superimposable in terms of symptoms – paranoia, in this case – can have very different natures, according to the moment at which an environmental failure has upset and obstructed the individual’s developmental journey.

Clinical reflections

Bonaminio G, Carratelli TI. The Unbearable Lightness of the Psyche’s Traces in Child Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Richard & Piggle, 33, 2, 2025, 126-145.

Through their discussion of a clinical case involving a five-year-old boy with an autistic type of functioning in some areas, the authors pose questions both about the complexities regarding the traces of the psyche left behind as implicit prenatal and neonatal memories and about the analytic relationship’s transformative potential in the here-and-now of the psychotherapy session.

When an asymbolic and non-representative functioning prevails, repetition can take the shape of a clinically significant process. This when it allows access to an enigmatic area of feeling through subsequent ‘new editions’ and ‘re-accommodations’ during the ‘second scene’ created by the session insofar as the latter is a transformative reference to the original traumatic scene.

It is through the framework of the illusion of finding/creating supported by the therapeutic relationship that the little patient can allow himself to re-live – and thus pass from “putting into act” to “enacting and putting into words” – what had remained at the edges of his mind as the ineffable, a whole series of sensations and affects in potential search of a subject and an object.

Gatti P. Journey through a Complex Motherhood: from the Impossible to What Can be Thought in the Mind and then Achieved in the Body. Richard & Piggle, 33, 2, 2025, 146-162.

In our work as psychotherapists, we increasingly commonly find ourselves facing new forms of parenthood: complex realities that force us to develop new ways of thinking and to embark on uncommon reflections. Heterologous medically assisted reproduction is a technique that forcefully brings profound and often unexplored experiences back to the surface in the form of feelings of intrusion and a tampering with one’s body, together with a series of unconscious representations that contribute to building parental identity. The case of Sara allows us to follow the journey in a difficult, complex motherhood: impossible at the beginning of therapy, it gradually becomes thinkable in the mind before being achieved in the body with the birth of a son. Recurring dreams laden with symbolic meaning mark the phases of the therapy and pregnancy, revealing the gradual process of acceptance and individuation involved in being a mother and accepting the child as her own.

Di Cori R. The Mind’s Shadows: Explorations of Psychic Figurability and the Roots of Criminal Behaviour in Young People. Richard & Piggle, 33, 2, 2025, 163-183.

Taking an exploration of the ties between reduced linguistic competence and delinquent behaviour in young people as his starting point, the author maintains that failure in the work of figuration constitutes an important factor for young people going on to commit delinquent acts. In the adolescent context, when the figurative capacity had been compromised or has not completely developed, internal and external events not represented by the mind can produce genuine “breaches” in the Self, which the young person can try to remedy by passing to action. The article examines two examples – one taken from a clinical case and the other from a well-known literary text – and concludes that improving adolescents’ linguistic and symbolic-representational abilities ought to constitute the strategic focal point for preventing anti-social behaviour and trying to salvage minors who have committed crimes.

SIPsIA Study Group Researching Adolescence. Adolescent Timeframes: Stalemate, Analytic Encounter and the Possible Activation of a Transformative Process. Richard & Piggle, 33, 2, 2025, 184-191.

Therapeutic intervention during adolescence can constitute a valuable opportunity both to prevent forms of malaise becoming chronic and to foster the re-activation of developmental potential.

If the definition of prevention makes one think of measures taken to guard against a future evil, could fragile adolescents paradoxically perceive the process of growing and its outcomes as a “future evil” from which they should protect themselves? This sensation of danger seems capable of contributing to the forming of symptoms designed to block and/or slow down the developmental process. Clinical excerpts are used both to demonstrate the different ways in which adolescents face the turmoil of the developmental phase and to outline possible varieties of therapeutic relationship.

Therapeutic Communities and Day Centres for Minors

Robert M., Fonzi L. Functioning and Existing. The Dimensions of Time and Body in Therapeutic Communities. Richard & Piggle, 33, 2, 2025, 192-209.

The article explores the mandate and therapeutic function of residential Communities, using the dimensions of time and the body during treatment journeys as a lens. Alongside the measurable goals relating to functioning, the patient’s existing – understood as subjective daily relational and bodily experience – is enhanced. Community life, with all its rhythms and forms of interaction, becomes a therapeutic space for working through experiences, traumas and identity-related stalemates, operating as it does through the double register of immediate experience and group reflection. Lastly, two clinical cases demonstrate how the body can become the theatre of expression for profound forms of suffering and how the team’s integrated work can support – including on the basis of the symptom - both the construction of narratives and processes of transformation.

The enchanting screen

Formicola P. The Children’s Train (2024). Directed by Cristina Comencini. How do you separate without getting lost? Richard & Piggle, 33, 2, 2025, 210-213.

Lana N. The Quiet Girl (2022). Directed by Colm Bairead. Richard & Piggle, 33, 2, 2025, 214-216.

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Contents & abstracts