Volume 46, Number 15 · October 7, 1999
Unlocking the Mind's Manacles
By Tim Parks
Storie permesse, storie proibite: polarità semantiche familiari e psicopatologie
by Valeria Ugazio
Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 305 pp., L60,000 (paper)
The paths by which one mind may come to influence another are curious indeed. Thus a new book by the Italian psychologist Valeria Ugazio exploring the family backgrounds of those suffering from phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and anorexia begins by drawing on observations made by the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson while he was working among the Iatmul Indians of New Guinea in the late 1920s. Behind both authors the anticonformist inspiration of the eighteenth-century English poet William Blake is frequently apparent, while between them lies the rise and fall of one of the most controversial recent adventures in psychotherapy, the so-called systemic approach.
Review, 7233 words
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