Letter from Florence

It is a fascinating decision to hold a conference on identifications in Florence. Now identified for more than five centuries with a brief portion of its millennial story, it sometimes seems imprisoned in its apparently timeless beauty, which is in fact extremely fragile and precarious. In this alternation of isolation and openness Florence is undoubtedly an ideal representation of Italian history. In the end, the characteristics of the development of psychoanalysis in Italy could also be summed up in the oxymoronic pairing of Isolation and Openness. It is thanks to this evolutionary niche that linguistic isolation has been transformed from a difficulty into an advantage. Italian psychoanalysis is a blend of different psychoanalytic traditions interpreted and retranslated into an autonomous psychoanalytic language. If we wish to trace a common feature in Italian psychoanalysis we could point to the concept of relationship as one of its most important transformations, with a shift of focus onto the work of the analytic couple. "Psyche is extended, knows nothing about it", the later Freud's most enigmatic legacy, seems to be one of the compasses for contemporary psychoanalytic research in Italy, one that spins around extensions of practice and the widening of technique.