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The Intimate Room: Theory and Technique of the Analytic Field (review)

Giuseppe Civitarese’s first book opens before the adventurous reader many doors leading into warm, intimate rooms that one is invited to explore. “Intimate,” of course, is what the analyst’s consulting room is by definition, and Civitarese embodies the promise of some recent developments of psychoanalytic theory and practice that have shown the relationship between patient and analyst to be warmer and more intimate than it has frequently been considered to be in the past. It is not by chance that the first chapter makes use of Freud’s metaphor of a fire at the theater to describe those situations in which an emotion suddenly bursting forth in the transference or the analyst’s internal setting—which Civitarese defines as “the capacity to hold oneself at a level of listening specifically directed towards understanding the patient’s unconscious” (14)—has a disruptive effect, causing a surprising change of scenery, a potentially transformative discontinuity. In the first chapter, with a similarly disruptive vigor, Civitarese tackles two themes at the core of contemporary psychoanalytic debate: the reality or unreality of the transference, and the interplay between internal and external worlds. These themes run through the whole book, and each chapter functions as a nodal point from which to view them in all their luminosity. The theoretical hypothesis from which the author starts is that