Contents & abstracts

Theory and technique

Garms V. A Good Enough Father. An Introduction to the Article by Heribert Blass. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 1-8.

The author discusses those knotty theoretical issues regarding the child-analyst relationship that were particularly dear to Heribert Blass and shows how these relate to Winnicottian theory. First of all, she dwells on the inter-corporeal dimension of the analytic encounter and, therefore, on the attention that Blass pays both to a child’s movements and acting out, and to the analyst’s own unconscious corporeal communication. Second, she discusses the oedipal dimension and the factors that, during the analytic encounter, can foster not only a gradual lessening of the destructive nature of fantasies about the primal scene but also the child’s discovery of new objects. In connection with such factors, she highlights Blass’s interesting idea that, in male children, access to an identification with the paternal figure is not so much something that occurs for fear of paternal retaliation as it is, rather, something stemming from a fundamental libidinal element of the relationship with a “good enough father”. One capable of transforming the destructive parts.

Blass H. On the gradual manufacturing of thoughts while a little patient screams and moves. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 9-24.

The author describes the different phases in the four-year-long psychoanalytic treatment of a boy in his latency period who was suffering from an inability to control his intensely felt affects. Taking the distinction between monological and dialogical elements in the child analysis process as his starting point, the author describes the development of emotional and cognitive capacities in this child as a gradual emerging of thoughts from corporeal forms of expression such as screaming and moving. By exploiting the presentational symbolism present in play (in drawing and in forms of corporeal interaction, for example) and accompanying it with verbal interpretations, it is possible to promote triangulation in the therapeutic space and the forming of discursive symbols. From that, one can gradually develop epistemic trust in the Other and in one’s own capacities for thought and control.

Rossi M. Experiencing mutuality in the exchanges occurring between patient and therapist at the corporeal level. Comments on the article by Heribert Blass. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 25-33.

The article seeks to offer a form of dialogue with and counterpoint to Heribert Blass’s article published in the pages preceding it. The author has chosen to focus on the issue of communication between analyst and patient at the corporeal and sensory level. From here, she goes on to pose questions regarding the subject of inter-corporeal communication in the therapy room when the patient is a child. This she links to Donald Winnicott’s concept of mutuality, which describes what is happening in the exchanges between mother and child during breast-feeding: an example of a first situation that fosters mirroring communication with the object. So it is between patient and child psychotherapist: through those exchanges that pass first through the senses and the body and then can be symbolized and put into words, the child understands emotionally while he/she is feeling understood, can identify with the other and can construct an ability to communicate.

Focus

Oppositional Defiant Disorder

Algini ML. Introduction. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 34-36.

Iorio ML. Opposing through one’s body and thinking. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 37-45.

In transference, oppositional attitudes seem to be expressed through channels involving different areas of development: the body, movement, language and thinking. The author uses excerpts from analytic therapies to help her describe instances of passage between such channels and how the latter sometimes flow one into another, both during the course of the psychotherapy and during different phases of development (childhood and adolescence).

The article highlights how, in some cases, that which during childhood was expressed through bodily acting out can, during adolescence, become thinking marked by peculiar features. Features that are often rigid, repetitive and tending to omnipotence and that retain the imprint of the first experiences in the body-psyche relationship.

Di Lucia E, Sateriale L. Existence-afffirming opposition in an adolescent with a disability. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 46-54.

The authors pose questions about the link between a physical disability and the oppositionally-defiant symptoms that manifested during an adolescent’s psychotherapy. The opposition took the form of repetitive thinking, thereby generating a block in emotional and relational growth: change was experienced as a threat to continuity of existence. The patient’s relationship with a fetish constituted a path to accessing the girl’s inner world and working on what the oppositional symptoms were condensing.

Bossaglia E. Opposition as a defence against depressive anxiety. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 55-61.

Psychotherapeutic work with a young girl who suffered the loss of her father while on the threshold of puberty revealed the oppositional symptom’s function of providing a way to protect herself from depressive forms of anxiety relating, on the one hand, to the very real loss and, on the other, to very early narcissistic scars that hindered separation due to a profound anger that was difficult to integrate. The subsequent change of course towards obsessive symptoms seems to have signaled a form of fragility and, at times, the risk of intense turbulence in the transitional space.

Algini ML. Sparks at the supervision scene. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 62-74.

Reflections on some psychotherapeutic journeys undertaken with children are interwoven with those relating to the experience of supervision itself as a “third space”: one woven out of a complex interplay of transference phenomena. The connection between the two experiences makes it possible to hypothesize that a precariousness in the symbolization capacity is at work in this disorder and that this leads to remaining stuck in a binary logic: either you win or I win. How are we to transform this type of swing into a simple suspension bridge, that, whilst being a suspended, swaying structure, makes crossings towards new modes of being possible?

Psychoanalysis and neuroscience

De Intinis G, Giannotti V. Introduction to the Article by Anatolia Salone. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 75-76.

The work focuses on wide-ranging very early traumatic experiences that are linked to failed tuning and regulation in the primary relationship. Referred to as “cumulative primary trauma”, these original failures play a central role in the deterioration of primary sensoriality during puberty. Cumulative primary trauma can represent the hidden ‘first act’ of an adolescent breakdown. In this case, the adolescent will find him/herself dealing with a body that – as the drives emerge – carries the memories of that earliest traumatic time within itself. The passage through the process of puberty and the investment in the sexed body will lack the support needed due to the absence of a positive sharing of the erogenous body. A clinical excerpt illustrates how the very early body-mind dissociation comes back to make itself felt, putting the adolescent’s mental balance at risk.

Salone A. The relational body. One of the self’s organizing principles in mental development. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 77-90.

The central role that psychoanalysis attributes to the body in inter-subjective relations is also the field of investigation for neuroscientific research on the corporeal Self. Study of the ontogenesis of corporeal perception has highlighted the presence of a fundamental sense of self in newborns and during intrauterine life and has highlighted the role of corporeal interaction, affective touch and peri-personal space in the development both of the mother-child synchronization mechanisms and of the structuring of the Self-Other boundary. Furthermore, the data deriving from studies on the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning the sense of self and intersubjective relations have shed new light on the fundamental role that changes in bodily perception play in the genesis of psychotic disorders.

The enchanting screen

Fondi E. Girl (2018). Directed by Lukas Dhont. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 91-94.

Robert M, Ronconi S. Monster (2023). Directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Richard & Piggle, 33, 1, 2025, 95-99.

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Contents & abstracts