Contents & abstracts

Theory and Technique
Carbone Tirelli L. Richard and Piggle remembers Melanie Klein. Richard & Piggle , 28, 1, 220, 1-7.

A tribute to Melanie Klein’s life and theory, sixty years on from her death: to a psychoanalyst who was able to draw ideas from the teachings of Freud and the great psychoanalysts who fervently developed his writings, from the vicissitudes of a complex period of history and from the most dramatic events in her own life but also, and primarily, from her encounters with her small patients’ anxiety in the analysis room and develop them all into an original theory that gave birth to important subsequent theoretical currents. Richard and Piggle is dedicating a section of its first edition in 2020 both to her thought and to reflections on an interesting part of her last, unpublished writings and notes on loneliness.


Melanie Klein. Notes On Loneliness
Milton J. Fron the Melanie Klein archive: Klein’s further thoughts on loneliness. Richard &
Piggle, 28, 1, 2020, 8-28.

The author brings to light previously unpublished material from the part of the Melanie Klein archive that deals with the subject of Klein’s last, posthumously published paper “On the sense of loneliness”. Here are found four differing versions of the loneliness paper, written between 1958 and 1960, and prepared for spoken presentations to different audiences. The author gives evidence from Klein’s copious additional notes that she intended to write a whole book or monograph dealing with the topic of loneliness from a psychoanalytic point of view. At the time of Klein’s death, as well as elaborating her own thinking on the topic of loneliness, she was gathering and incorporating the comments of a number of close colleagues on her work. Previously unpublished letters to Klein from Wilfred Bion and Elliott Jaques are included in this paper, as are extracts from Klein’s own notes, organized under a number of headings. Without attempting to analyse the material in any depth, the author suggests that some of the themes Klein was working on may have had particular relevance for her personally in what turned out to be the very last months of her life.


Petrelli D. On loneliness in the margin of the notes from the Melanie Klein archive Richard & Piggle , 28, 1, 2020, 29-44.

Taking its cue from Jane Milton’s paper, From the Melanie Klein Archive: Klein’s Further Thoughts on Loneliness (2018, published in Italian in this edition), the article comments on hitherto unpublished documents cited in the paper in relation to the subject of loneliness: two unpublished letters to Melanie Klein from Bion and one from E. Jaques, as well as various notes that Melanie Klein herself wrote. The author analyses the texts in the context of how Klein’s thought evolved: the importance of and need for loneliness for the creative process and integration; the early intimacy with the mother, established through the direct contact of preverbal understanding preceding the splitting mechanisms, which contact is seen as the basis for the desire for integration and interior harmony; the relationship between a sense of loneliness and integration; and the instability and intrinsic incompleteness of the integration processes throughout life, from infancy to old age.

Focus
Gender fluidity during the age of development and the primal secne

Costis A. Introduction. Richard & Piggle , 28, 1, 2020, 45-48.

Fusacchia M.G. In the beginning there was … mutual understanding. Richard & Piggle , 28, 1, 2020, 49-58.

This article offers a closer theoretical examination of the concept of dependence qua the foundation on which human psychic functioning is built. Beginning with the expression “mutual understanding” (or “understanding with other people”, as Freud’s term has been translated in his Project for a Scientific Psychology), it retraces how the concept of dependence has evolved, including in the light of the function that the object performs, initially supporting biological maturation and, at the same time, paving the way for psychic life, desire and thinking. As the child’s psychic functioning develops, his/her psyche progressively opens up to recognition of a third person, the father. The author’s reflections seek to emphasize that dependence evolves not into independence but, rather, access to the Oedipal dimension or, in other words, recognition of the other and of difference.


Carratelli T. I., Costis A., Massaro L. V., Brando M., Ciampa L., Scalise S. Fluidity of being. The primal scene and defensive recourse to a lack of sexual differentiation Richard & Piggle , 28, 1, 2020, 59-69.

Whilst taking account of the scientific literature on gender fluidity, the authors turn to explore the “unconscious secret” kept by their patients, paying particular attention to how it is generated in the conscious and unconscious, two-way parent-child relationship. Clinical experience suggests the presence of an early psychological trauma linked to parental rejection of the child’s sexed corporeal Self and a physically present but emotionally absent mother. That leads the child to cling to unconscious, imitative defences and to seek gratifying states of sexual non-differentiation characteristic of the imagination’s in-dependence. The emphasis is placed on the haunting effect of the primary scene in which such patients are traumatically included.
D’Angelo V., Fiore C., Massaro L. V. Fractures in absolute dependence: gender fluidity and manic tones. Richard & Piggle , 28, 1, 2020, 70-75.

The authors present some clinical excerpts to illustrate the various forms that child psychic development can take following an early rupture in relations during the phase of absolute dependence. Indeed, the “original hole” linked to an absence of primary maternal care can be filled either through the activity of a hypertrophic mind, characterised by manic and hallucinatory thinking, or by the mother’s overinvestment of unconscious phantasies in her son, who can become her “double” and remain in a state of undefined gender.


Nitiffi C. If you leave me, i blank myself out. the peripeteias of imitation in search of the self. Richard & Piggle , 28, 1, 2020, 76-80.

The article seeks to reflect on the preconscious and unconscious dynamics that led Elliot, a boy of African origin adopted at the presumed age of 7, to resort to transvestism through theatrical performance. Taking an analysis of the transference/counter-transference relationship as her starting point, the author outlines the hypothesis that Elliot, through recourse to the defence of ‘“imitating in order to be”, is seeking to blank out the profound wound his Self has sustained.


Pavel O.R. Retreat into the imagination and gender fluidity during adolescence. Richard & Piggle , 28, 1, 2020, 81-85.

This theoretico-clinical article presents the case of a gender-fluid, socially withdrawn adolescent who defends himself against an early trauma by clinging to the effects of a manic imagining characteristic of a phantasy of psychic bisexuality.

Clinical Reflections
Cardarelli B. From trauma’s manifestations to its representability during child
psychoanalytic. Richard & Piggle, 28, 1, 2020, 86-98.

The article considers the subject of traumatic experiences, understood as a psychological trauma or the crushing negative emotions that are mobilized by the real event. Ferenczi emphasizes the pain and anxiety experienced in the psychic life and seeks new technical tools that can allow the analyst to “listen” to the patient’s silences, actions and instances of dissociation or fragmentation as a “manifestation” of the trauma. It is within this theoretical framework that the author presents the clinical case of a six and a half-year-old girl who suffered a profound physical trauma at the very early age of 10 months. The little girl was immersed in a world of phantasies and hallucinatory delusion: by analysing her mental functioning’s highly pathological mechanisms (fragmentation, splitting and projection), it became possible for the early traumatic experience to manifest and gradually be represented. In the stable, safe container of the analysis room, a mental space was created in which oneiric images gave voice to the trauma.

The Enchanting Screen
Gentile A. Roma. Richard & Piggle, 28, 1, 2020, 99-101.


D’Amato G.M. Pain and Glory. Richard & Piggle , 28, 1, 2020, 102-105.

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