The rise of video games as a mass cultural phenomenon – once confined to a niche hobby for enthusiasts – has triggered a profound shift in their social and scientific perception. Academic research, moving beyond the “moral panic” that for decades limited discussion to topics such as addiction and aggression, has begun to explore their immense potential in innovative fields like psychological well-being and therapy. Within this context, Video Game Therapy® (VGT) emerges as a structured psychotherapeutic approach that, rather than demonizing the video game medium, consciously integrates it into the clinical setting, recognizing its value as a tool for change. [...]

The text underlines the links and logic between psychoanalysis, crime fiction, and art criticism, the common basis of which is the “aesthetic of the sign”, a formula composed of two unbeatable devices: the semiotic-hermeneutic code and the method of abduction. Abduction, a procedure theorized by Peirce (1989), uses a lateral approach, an icon of choice of the creative processes underlying the “discovery”; an investigative culture that does not stop at surface level and the obvious but identifies alternative levels of interpretation. The protagonists of this approach are those secondary details which, although negligible, are instead vehicles of meaning, supporting a sort of epistemology of predictability, attentive to the fragments of meaning that are reconstructed from thin clues, minimal signs, which seem insignificant and negligible. Very similar to this is the approach proposed in Morelli’s method (1890) of art criticism, which refers to a minimalist perspective that captures the residual data, the marginal element, as something revealing. These methods used in the investigation by the detective and art critic are treated in the contribution as a way of “importing” into the analysis room the salience of transformative clues, such as the patient’s plasticity parameters and the register of his/her evolutionary needs. The indices of alternative and change that are at the margin of the patient’s story, but not marginal, take on a vague and nuanced contour, indicating their germinal state. The proposed hypothesis is that the therapeutic value lies in welcoming these clues, recognizing the patient’s potential for change, and proposing them again for self-reflection in the analytical pair. To conclude, clinical vignettes are presented.

The author explores the divergence between Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Gustav Jung’s conceptions of the unconscious, emphasizing their differing views on the nature of the unconscious and its role in the human psyche. Freud interprets the unconscious as a container of repressed impulses and desires, while Jung proposes a more dynamic and creative model, in which the unconscious serves as a source of evolutionary potential and individuation. The article also discusses the concept of the “implicit unconscious” in modern neuroscience, highlighting how these approaches compare to traditional psychoanalytic ideas. Specifically, a “prospective” conception of the unconscious is presented, capable of influencing decisions and guiding behavior toward new forms of self-knowledge and creativity. Through clinical case studies and references to modern physical theories, it is proposed that prospective unconsciousness can catalyze processes of change and transformation within the individual, reflecting a much more integrated and relational view of the human being in the context of their environment. The author suggests that psychotherapy should embrace this prospective dimension of the unconscious to facilitate a deeper understanding of the self and relational dynamics, promoting a creative dimension of the human subject.

I still remember the emotion I felt in 1974 when I saw Scenes from a Marriage by Ingmar Bergman. Since then, I have been convinced that Scandinavian directors possess a unique sensitivity in portraying emotional relationships. This impression resurfaced while watching the film by the Norwegian director Lilja Ingolfsdottir. La solitudine dei non amati (the original title, Lovable, might have been more appropriate, and certainly preferable to the first Italian version, La teoria dell’attaccamento…) is a work that lends itself to many interpretations and, like all films rich in dialogue, deserves multiple viewings. I will try to share the thoughts it prompted in me. [...]

This text is a manual that contributes to enriching Italian literature – still limited but continuously developing – on gender identity, and represents an attempt to integrate different visions and perspectives through a rich and ongoing process of discussion and exchange, curated by the colleague Fabio Rapisarda, who here gathers various contributions from different disciplines and fields on the subject. [...]

This paper describes a single, intensive therapeutic intervention with a 17-year-old adolescent, Marco. The case illustrates how, in specific psychic and relational configurations, a targeted intervention supported by an effective metaphor can trigger a process of insight and significant change within a short time. The theoretical framework integrates relational psychoanalysis, with particular attention to internal working models (Bowlby, 1988), alongside Jungian concepts of individuation and Bion’s (1962) notion of the transformative function of thought.

The encounter with an adolescent is first and foremost an encounter between human beings, as I will try to address in commenting on Marco’s life story. I emphasize “life story”, thinking of Marco as a young person grappling with his first emotional investments, with the powerful and destabilizing – but also imaginative and vital – upheavals of those years of life in which falling in love, relationships, and disappointments are nothing more than opportunities to experience stepping into life, in the attempt to start from oneself, with all the fears of the unknown and of not knowing where to begin. [...]

The Focus of the third issue of Ricerca Psicoanalitica is oriented toward a clinical practice that is attentive both to signs and to minimal details, and to those phenomena that are always in the process of being defined and which – often after having been extensively addressed over time – oscillate between the temptation to cease defining them and the need to redefine them, given their profound clinical implications. [...]

Psychoanalysis has been interested in myths since its foundation, arousing both interest and criticism from scholars of historical and anthropological disciplines: on the one hand, in fact, the psychoanalytic model allows us to explain the creative processes that generated them and the attractiveness that they exercised on ancient populations, and on the other hand presents limits of congruence with the data that historical and literary research associates with them. This work proposes an integrated analytical approach, which associates historical and literary evidence with an analytic method that integrates the interpretation of symbols, specifically those of perversion, within the narrative structure, considering both elements significant. A decoding of the myth of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur will therefore be conducted, as it was used in that of Theseus, Ariadne and the foundation of Attica.

Nevroticismo. Un nuovo quadro di riferimento per i disturbi emotivi e il loro trattamento is the Italian edition, edited by Simone Cheli for Giovanni Fioriti Editore, of the book Neuroticism: a new framework for emotional disorders and their treatment by Shannon Sauer-Zavala and David H. Barlow. The book sits at the center of the debate between categorical and dimensional perspectives, proposing the usefulness of a transdiagnostic approach that, specifically, identifies neuroticism as the central factor both for the conceptualization and the treatment of a wide range of disorders. [...]