No 1 (2023)

This volume is dedicated to hunger, a very relevant theme from both a biological and psychological point of view, and one that crosses various scientific and ethical issues. Freud has always considered the individual's relationship with his own hunger a pivotal element in psychic evolution, basing the development of thought activity on the group of self-preservation drives. Observation of the psychic manifestations associated with hunger prompted an investigation into the dynamics that accompany normal and pathological behaviour and opened up more general problems relating to the constitution of the subject, the development of the living being and its relationship with the outside world.
These considerations have led to current explanatory models being judged inadequate, especially the reductionist model that treats the psychic processes linked to hunger as mere epiphenomena of the physiological ones. This model in fact circumscribes hunger to biological phenomena linked to nutrition, isolating them from the semantics that instead emerges from this capital function to which the survival of living beings is anchored. Freudian metapsychology, on the other hand, makes it possible to delineate a model of naturalisation of the psychic, which is necessary to understand the phenomena of meaning related to hunger, a model capable of providing answers to the relevant epistemological questions that the reductionist approach instead evades.

In this regard, the article by Franco Baldini, which opens the volume, proposes a circumstantial reflection of an epistemological order, which starts precisely from the observation of the many difficulties that epistemologists have encountered in their attempts to model the phenomenon of hunger in its entirety, and outlines the conceptual framework of its realisation. The article touches on important problems such as the relationship between reduction and naturalisation, the relationship between objectivity and ontology, the relationship between different objectivities and the constitution of objectivities themselves.
This modelling is then developed in Stefania Olivier's article, which takes the Freudian concept of drive and analyses its components - source, preassure, aim and object - through a vector formalisation. The article also carries out a precise analysis of several passages from Lacan's The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, from which emerges the incompatibility of Lacanian drive theory with Freudian drive theory and the impossibility of constructing a clinic of hunger pathologies from Lacan's theoretical assumptions.

It is precisely from these theoretical clarifications that several knots are unravelled on the clinical level, some of which are taken up in Pamela Cagna's article that reconsiders from a metapsychological perspective the salient points of Dick and Robert's two infantile clinical cases, deepening a new nosographic hypothesis already mentioned in a study published in volume 1/2022 of this same journal.
Still in the clinical field, in the Documents and debates section, Giovanna Agabio's translation of K. Abraham's letter to Freud dated 31 March 1915 is published, in which the subject of hunger is dealt with. Abraham considers of fundamental importance, in the melancholic subject, the presence of two symptomatic psychic aspects linked to hunger: the first concerning the fear of dying of hunger, the second the refusal of nourishment.

In Annalena Guarnieri's article a theoretical reflection is conducted on the process of the eroticization of hunger, which can have the most inauspicious consequences on a clinical level; the article takes its cue from Kafka's short story A Hunger Artist and proposes a metapsychological interpretation, highlighting what it means to make a drive for self-preservation act as if it were a sexual drive, as happens in anorexia. The article is also a commentary on the work of Michele Bertolini, who brings his own reflection to bear on Kafka's tale. Drawing on her academic expertise in the field of Aesthetics, Bertolini proposes an interpretation of the story that sheds light on certain contemporary art practices, performance practices that shift the centre of gravity of art from aesthetics to ethics, towards an art of living, everyday behaviour.

Silvana Dalto, noting that the theme of hunger is very rarely dealt with by philosophers, argues for its revival in Husserl's late thought and compares the philosopher's and Freud's work. The article shows that Husserl, while accepting from psychoanalysis the need to extend the horizon of phenomenology to a sphere that includes drives, and thus primarily hunger, in order to ground the processes of life and living in a transcendental sense, nevertheless gives a development that excludes the very empirical subject that should be at the basis of the transcendental subject; hunger becomes a 'universal drive', with no relationship to precise dynamics. This shows the insufficiency of an elaboration on the subject without a clinical basis, as is the case in Freud.
The recovery of the Freudian notion of 'self-preservation drives' is therefore decisive for constructing a satisfactory modelling of hunger, both for the advancement of theoretical and clinical elaboration in the psychoanalytic field, and for promoting multidisciplinary research, capable of generating observations that reach out to touch not only the epistemological, philosophical, literary and artistic fields, to which the journal has given testimony here, but also sectors such as the biological sciences, medicine, ethology and others that we hope to welcome in the future.

Unrelated to the main theme, it remains to mention the second part of Maria Grazia Tosto's article that responds to Schatzmann's criticism of President Schreber's Freudian clinical case; and finally, to conclude in style, we would like to point out the section dedicated to the online presentation of Franco Baldini's book Transfert. Sette lezioni sulla teoria freudiana del trattamento psicanalitico (Seven lessons on the Freudian theory of psychoanalytic treatment); it collects the dialogue held between Edoardo Toffoletto, Marco Ferrari and Franco Baldini on psychoanalysis, on its cognitive and non-medical objectives, on the irreplaceable instrument that it is, today even more than yesterday, for understanding reality, love and social life.