Giovanni Hautmann: The Passion for Thought

This editorial project intends to pay homage to Giovanni Hautmann's thought and to his theoretical elaboration.

Giovanni Hautmann (Florence, 1927-2017) was president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and trained generations of analysts. Together with numerous articles, he has published some fundamental texts, among which: Analytical functions of the mind, Psychoanalysis between art and biology, My debt with Bion. Many of these volumes are out of print and we hope that this book will arouse interest around his work and lead to future reprints. For this reason, we decided to insert, at the opening of the contributions and at the end, two of his writings, that seem to us to be particularly representative of his production. Despite the fact that during his presidency, he had promoted the bilingual (Italian-English) publication of the official journal of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society for the first time, his books have never been published in other languages and therefore his thinking remains still little known abroad. Our project also stems from the desire to bring attention back to its theoretical-clinical construction and also to extend it, including in the publication contributions that put his thoughts in dialogue with other psychoanalytic cultures.