Contents & abstracts



Theory and Technique
Burruni F. Between psychoanalysis and cognitivism: some notes on child development.
Richard & Piggle , 28, 2, 2020, 121-137.

In the first part of this article, the author summarizes the main concepts in the theory of Wilma Bucci, who has sought to integrate psychoanalysis and cognitivism with the aim of creating a general theory of psychology that truly succeeds in integrating emotional and cognitive processes. In the second part of the article, the author compares some of Bucci’s main concepts with some of those developed by Matte Blanco and other authors. This with the aim of pinpointing the ones that can offer useful contributions and areas of enquiry for an increasingly in-depth psychoanalytical study on the connection between emotion and cognition in child development. In this context, he highlights both the function of the relationship with external reality in the regulation of the emotional/cognitive processes and the complexity of the introjective processes.

Focus
Home

Preliminary remarks

Guerriera C. Introduction. Richard & Piggle , 28, 2, 2020, 139-144.

Parisi G. The Affects’ “Place”: On The Home’s Symbolic And Affective Meaning. Richard & Piggle , 28, 2, 2020, 145-148.

The author offers a reflection on a theme that accompanies each one of us throughout life, namely, the emotional or affective experience of “home”: home as it is lived in, experienced, left, abandoned, lost, destroyed, built and rebuilt. Home as refuge, protection and containment but also as a port from which to depart on voyages of new discovery and “put out to sea”. A part of the reflection concerns the different traumatic experiences linked to the loss of home and the connected implications. The author also considers “home’s” symbolic function and what its various representations refer to: home as border and interface with the external world and as the representation of the relationship with a welcoming or rejecting maternal figure. Home as a border territory that delimits and defines an inside and an outside; a way in and a way out at the same time. And then there is the loss of home as the risk of losing an identity-conferring tie. In this sense, art and literature are important languages that permit an immediate, direct representation of the relationship between the individual, his/her own places and home, on the one hand, and his/her identity and sense of belonging, on the other.


Armaro M. Body and affects in oneiric elements during awakening. Richard & Piggle , 28, 2, 2020, 161-169.

The author seeks to organize the elements connecting the body, the affects and relationships, making use of certain passages and key points in literature and thinking that focus principally on the themes of awakening, re-finding one’s self, one’s origins and the relationship with one’s parents when one is no longer young and possible experiences of closeness with them seem to be at stake. Psychoanalysis, neuroscience, philosophy and literature all seem to contribute to the creation of a common area for working through certain instances of passage in the human experience, such as the threshold between waking and dreaming, the act of awakening with its re-installation of consciousness accompanied by emotions lived in the body, the nexuses between evolution and history and the minimal but fundamental changes in the relationship between self and other.


De Micco V. The missing root. From homesickness to the disorientation created by non-places. Richard & Piggle , 28, 2, 2020, 170-183.

This article examines the complex psychic and cultural dynamics that can be observed when the “home” dimension appears torn between loyalty to one’s origins and the need to “be assimilated by” the new, receiving context, as in migration cases and, more generally, when such dimension appears lost in the extreme instability of those meta-psychic and meta-social referents characterising our times of which René Kaës speaks. The author analyses, in particular, the repercussions that such dynamics have on trans-generational ties and identification processes.


Mazzoncini G.M. Home tells our story and reveals our affects. Richard & Piggle , 28, 2, 2020, 184-189.

The article highlights the extent to which home represents the intimate relationship between internal and external worlds and how close the link between the concrete place and affects is in the osmotic exchange occurring between aspects of reality and emotional meanings that are interwoven. Sometimes taking brief clinical vignettes as her starting point, the author describes the various meanings that home assumes during the different phases of life, from infancy to old age. She also distinguishes the “home-affects place” of childhood – an oneiric place that belongs to us throughout our lives – from the home experienced from the beginning of adult life as the place where one puts down one’s emotional and identity-related roots.
Clinical Reflections
Algini M.L. In boredom’s limbo: experiences with children in psychotherapy. Richard &
Piggle, 28, 2, 2020, 190-202.

With their enigmatic declaration “I’m bored”, children undergoing psychotherapy seem to open a sort of portal leading into a world made up of very different regions. There is a boredom that is a sort of “paralysis of desire”: one that seems to stem partly from the passivity that the childhood condition imposes. There is a boredom full of feelings of sadness and loss, which is expressed in symptoms operating as extreme ways of uttering a cry for help. There is a boredom that cannot be expressed in words and can only be communicated through an “infection” that has to be shared before it can be thought. By way of various clinical snapshots, the article seeks to give a glimpse of some of these experiences and their analytical evolution. Boredom proves to be a kind of threshold that can allow different directions and transformations: it can encyst in melancholic immobility but it can also be that moment of “standstill” that is a prelude to moments of passage or vital turning-points.

Clinical Diary
Pisciotta A. Migration and journeys in identity-building during adolescence. Richard &
Piggle, 28, 2, 2020, 203-213.

Taking her clinical experience with young immigrants in an outpatients’ clinic in Palermo as her starting point, the author offers some reflections on the dual nature of the process of identity-building in adolescent migrants: alongside the elements of novelty and instability proper to their age, they also have to tackle an external cultural system that, more often than not, is incongruent with their internal cultural container. The author dwells on the psychotherapeutic journey with a boy from Central West Africa. It exemplifies not only the complexity of the identity-building processes linked to the trauma of migration but also certain aspects of the therapeutic relationship associated with the difference between the patient’s and the therapist’s cultural worlds.

The Enchanting Screen
Gentile A. For Sama. Richard & Piggle, 28, 2, 2020, 214-216.

Cavicchio L. My Brother Chases Dinosaurs. Richard & Piggle , 28, 2, 2020, 217-219.

Reviews

Recommended Reading

Contents & Abstracts