Overview

The book includes five chapters: The disappearance fantasy; The disappearance fantasy and the death instinct; The disappearance fantasy and oral ambivalence; The disappearance fantasy and envy; and Projection and intuition. In this book, Fagioli formulated what has become known as Human Birth Theory, according to which, human thought arises at birth with newborns' reaction to light. This theory, which anticipates recent findings in contemporary infant research, has been confirmed by new scientific discoveries in neonatology, neurobiology and particle physics. The Italian Ministry for Education has recently approved the setting-up of The School of Dynamic Psychotherapy Bios Psyche, for graduates, based on the cultural and scientific model of Human Birth Theory. The book offers a new psychodynamic theory and an innovative and consistent therapeutic approach to all those who work in the fields of psychiatry and psychotherapy. Many readers, though not directly involved in clinical work, appreciate the book for its new theory on the human psyche. A large number of European psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have based their therapeutic practice on the theory and principles put forward in this book.

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9788864430188

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Reviews

It's a book all mums should read as it explains how fragile we are and how it all starts from there, from separation at birth[...]. Barbara Palombelli, radio journalist. Death instinct and knowledge is a fundamental text to understand the origin and the development of the human psyche and identity, and for the interpretation of dreamlike images[...]. Maurizio Mannoni, TV journalist. Death instinct and knowledge represents a revolution in the theorization of the functioning of the human psyche [...]. Daniela Ubaldi, journalist. I was struck by Massimo Fagioli's thought about human birth just as I was by his putting interhuman relationships at the centre. Giacomo Marramao, philosopher. Massimo Fagioli gave a precise answer to the question: what does human beings' social nature consist of? And he did that by investigating human beings' birth dynamic and the onset of psychic reality. Ernesto Longobardi, professor and economist

Author Information

Massimo Fagioli (Monte Giberto, May 19th, 1931 - Rome, February 13th, 2017), was a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist known for having theorized 'the disappearance fantasy' - the bedrock of what he himself called 'Human Birth Theory' - and for the seminars of Analisi collettiva [Collective analysis]. He was a physician, a philosopher, and an artist who made of his own life and medical practice the inexhaustible source of his research into human reality. Every event, situation, and experience, was an occasion for him to observe, think about and understand that which has always been invisible to the eyes of wakefulness and conscience. On November 25th, 1957, he gained his degree in Medicine and Surgery and, instead of pursuing a career as a surgeon, he decided to become a psychiatrist, refusing the idea that mental illnesses are incurable. On January 29th, 1958, he went to Venice to start his first job as a psychiatrist at the psychiatric hospital on the Isle of San Clemente. However, after only two years, having grown tired of a reality based on an organicist approach to mental illness, he left Venice and, in January 1960, moved to Padua to work at the psychiatric hospital there. However, although the Paduan milieu allowed him to adopt a series of psychiatric approaches that were revolutionary and innovative at that time and to write two articles that laid the basis for further research into the etiopathogenesis of mental illness and psychotherapeutic practice, after two years, he decided to leave. And, in January 1963, he went to Kreuzlingen, in Switzerland, to work at Sanatorium Bellevue headed by Dr. Binswanger. There, while working as the director of the therapeutic community, he carried out further research into mental illnesses and psychotherapeutic practice, in particular group psychotherapy. In December 1963, he moved to Rome. After almost one year, the experience of the therapeutic community came to an end because, once again, Fagioli felt he could not work freely, and started to run individual psychotherapy. In the years that followed, he wrote Istinto di morte e conoscenza [Death instinct and knowledge] in 1971, La marionetta e il burattino and Teoria della nascita e castrazione umana in 1974. In 1975, he was called to run supervision for psychiatrists and psychotherapists at the University of Rome, which suddenly attracted hundreds of people who went there to ask for dream interpretation. This is how a unique psychotherapeutic practice, which was then called Analisi collettiva, started: a reality of cure, education and research that hinged on the interpretation of dreamlike images, which Massimo Fagioli carried out without interruptions for more than 40 years. In 1979, Fagioli wrote his fourth book Bambino donna e trasformazione dell'uomo. In 1980, Analisi collettiva was driven out from University, and in order to avoid it being interrupted, Fagioli found a location suitable to host hundreds of people. In all these years, apart from running weekly sessions of group psychotherapy, Fagioli often found himself having to respond to stimuli coming from areas that were apparently distant from the psychiatric field: from architecture to the cinema, from politics to economics (just to mention a few). In 1992, the quarterly journal of psychiatry and psychotherapy, Il Sogno della Farfalla, was first published. The journal was founded by a group of psychiatrists, who have based their clinical activity on Fagioli's theoretical work and the practice of Analisi Collettiva. From 2002 to 2012 Fagioli held courses of Dynamic Psychology at the University of Chieti Gabriele D'Annunzio; from 2006 to 2017, every week, he wrote the column 'Trasformazione' for Left, a weekly political magazine. Both experiences turned into volumes where the 'Story of a research' and the Theory were explained, elaborated and expounded.

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