Contents & abstracts



Focus
Adolescents and Female Sexuality Today

A.M. Nicolò and L. Accetti. Introduction. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 117-122.


E. Laufer. The Female Oedipal Complex and the Fear of Passivity. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 123-133.

The article touches on many important issues that a wide-ranging literature on female sexuality has long been debating. The author emphasises the importance attached by women to feeling that they were “born girls”, and how that can constitute a good defence against the fantasy that femininity is something imposed on them by their mother with whom they fight and compete in order to become different and not passively surrender.


P. Grieve. The Sexed Female Body’s Representation – Comments on Egle Laufer’s Article. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 134-142.

Through the dreams that a young patient brought to her analysis, the author explores the origins and evolution of the sexed female body’s representation and highlights the passage from an archaic sexuality to an adult sexuality centred on genitality. In the clinical material’s presentation, emphasis is given to the dialectic between the transference relationship and the patient’s relationship with her own body, both of which carry traces of the subject’s history of identification.


L. Accetti and M. Mazzolini. The Development of Female Sexuality in Traumatic Contexts. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 143-151.

The authors present clinical material taken from a collection of expert-witness diagnoses that illustrates the kind of disorganization that an early instance of sexual abuse and its repetition generates in a girl’s psychic life and in the development of female sexuality. A topical ground for comparison that psychoanalysis can reflect on but also, and above all, a valuable and distinguished contribution coming from a working environment other than the strictly psychotherapeutic one.


L. Celotto. Femininity and Fatherliness: Some Reflections that Began with a Story. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 152-161.

Taking the aspects of suggestion offered by A.M. Ortese’s story “Occhi obliqui” (“Slanting Eyes”) as its starting point, the work proposes a reflection on some key points that may be identified in the specific development occurring during female puberty. An imaginary scene depicting the beginning of adolescence in the story offers the possibility both of tracing some of the central themes in the development characterising the process of constructing a feminine identity and of dwelling not only on the part played by the processes of idealization (starting with the Oedipal investments) but also on the dynamics of investing in new objects, with all the developments and possible forms of drift that can occur during these delicate and important moments of developmental passage.

Focus
The Father Who Dies and the Father Who Remains: Experiences of Fatherliness during Children’s Mourning

M.A. Algini. Introduction. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 162-164.


C. Arcangeli. “Looking at the Sky All Alone”. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 165-171.

This work describes the psychoanalytic therapy undergone by a three-and-a-half year-old boy, as his psyche grappled with a double mourning linked to the loss of his natural father and, subsequently, the death of the person who inherited that function, just as the paternal tie was being forged.


M.L. Iorio. “What? You went to See Daddy and You didn’t Tell Me?”. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 172-178.

In this article, the author begins with her experience of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a child whose father died prematurely. She emphasises the importance, in the mourning process, of the paternal dimension that existed before the traumatic event – both in the individual parents and in the couple – and how such paternal element is expressed in the transference dynamics.


L. Pizzo. Cecilia and the Father who Didn’t Put Up the Safety Net. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 179-184.

This article focuses on some themes emerging during the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a preadolescent girl coping with the sudden and traumatic loss of her mother – a loss that also caused her to mutilate her own body. The repercussions within the relationship with the father figure are highlighted, as are some of the developments during the psychotherapy undergone by each of the protagonists.


M.L. Algini. The Enigma of the “Third” in Children’s Mourning. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 185-197.

This work is a reflection on the three clinical situations presented and some of their central issues. The author dwells, in particular, on the enigma of the third in mourning: not only on the difficulty that a child encounters in reconciling the dead parent’s absence from the external reality with the continuation of his/her presence in their internal reality, but also on the quality that the remaining parent vests in the third person no longer there and the way in which this is done.


G. Bruno. The Time for Silence, the Time for Words and, perhaps, for a New Illusion. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 198-205.

The author offers some considerations regarding the role of widowed parents in supporting their children as they work through mourning. She considers the delicate interweaving both of the parent’s experiences with those of the children and of the different developmental phases with the parental functions regarding the experience of limits. She also considers the importance of respecting the amount of time each person needs for working-through, during which silence, too, can signify not only denial but also a preparation for the moment of thinking and transformations. Particular attention is paid to the experience of creativity, in line with Winnicottian theory and its development through the contribution of Marion Milner in, precisely, the area of illusion.

The Enchanting Screen
P. Ricciardi. The Crods. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 206-208.


S. Cimino. Hungry Hearth. Richard & Piggle, 23, 2, 2015, 209-211.

Book reviews