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Article written in collaboration with @mariadalpratogrosu.psicologa Pathological addictions are often understood, in common sense terms, as a matter of willpower or as a simple pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. Psychodynamic literature instead proposes a different interpretive key: the substance (or behavior) should not be understood only for its effects, but for the function it comes to serve in the person's psychic life. Beyond Pleasure: The Substance as an Emotional R

Article written in collaboration with @psy.giusybua Human sexuality expresses itself along a spectrum far broader than common culture tends to acknowledge. Within clinical practice, the topic of paraphilias remains one of the most delicate to address, suspended between the need to depathologize atypical sexuality and the need to identify, when present, forms of distress or risk that require intervention. This article offers an overview of the topic, distinguishing the concept

The Art of Conversation, Magritte (1963) Introduction to the project — Trajectories Trajectories is the newsletter of The Developmental Library, a community-led space for anyone moving through the world of developmental and lifespan psychology. Every month we give voice to professionals and scholars who share their journey with authenticity: their everyday work, the tools they use, the resources they find valuable, the questions that still stay with them. We are not looking f

Introduction to the Column: The Unconscious of History History doesn't end in textbooks. It survives in the institutions we inhabit, in the ways we think about care, in the language we use to describe those who suffer. "The Unconscious of History" is born from a simple conviction: that understanding how the past has built the psychological categories we use today — of normality, deviance, therapy, exclusion — is a necessary clinical and intellectual act, not a nostalgic exerc

Article written in collaboration with @psicoluce Introduction: A Growing Phenomenon Over the past few decades, burnout has evolved from a niche construct, initially studied in relation to helping professions alone, into a cross-cutting phenomenon recognized in virtually every occupational sector. This expansion has brought with it growing theoretical complexity: today burnout is understood not as a single stress reaction, but as the outcome of a multifactorial process involvi

Introduction Imagine reading the number "7" and automatically seeing it colored blue, or listening to a symphony and perceiving, alongside the notes, geometric shapes moving through space. For most people this is pure fantasy, but for those living with synesthesia it is an everyday, involuntary, and entirely real experience. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive modality automatically produces a perceptual experience in a

Article written in collaboration with @dott.ssa_giuliagiulivi Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) was introduced as an independent diagnostic category in the DSM-5, replacing and expanding the previous definition of "feeding disorder of infancy or early childhood" (American Psychiatric Association, 2022). Unlike anorexia and bulimia nervosa, ARFID is not driven by a desire to control body weight or shape, but by an avoidance or restriction of food intake that ca

Article written in collaboration with @dott.ssa_giuliagiulivi In recent years, the theme of "clean" eating has gained increasing space across social media, wellness influencers, and a growing cultural focus on what we eat. Within this context, orthorexia nervosa has emerged — a term first coined by physician Steven Bratman in 1997 to describe people whose extreme diets, intended for health reasons, paradoxically end up causing malnutrition or impairing daily functioning (Brat

Newsletter created by Erika Marchioro Welcome to Questions that Open Doors. Here you'll find a question, a story, or a reflection born from observing people, relationships, and those little things that often go unnoticed. You won't find definitive answers. The most important questions rarely serve to close something. Rather, they serve to open up a listening space, to look at a situation from a different perspective or to rediscover something we had forgotten. Take your time.

Every year, as August arrives, a quiet but pervasive social script switches on: you have to get away, you have to have fun, you have to "unplug" — and do it well. Anyone who doesn't follow this script, whether by choice or by necessity, often finds themselves dealing with a subtle discomfort that's hard to name because it's rarely socially validated: how can anyone possibly suffer over... a vacation? And yet contemporary psychology offers several useful lenses for understandi

Introduction Few figures in the history of developmental psychology have had an impact comparable to that of Mary Dinsmore Salter Ainsworth. While John Bowlby provided the theoretical framework of attachment, it was Ainsworth who turned it into an empirical research program, capable of measuring what had until then remained a clinical intuition (Bretherton, 1992). This article traces the key milestones of her work, from her early fieldwork in Uganda to the creation of the Str

Project Introduction — Trajectories Trajectories is the newsletter of The Developmental Library, a community-driven space for anyone navigating the world of developmental and life-course psychology. Every month we give a voice to professionals and scholars who tell their story with authenticity: the daily work, the tools they use, the resources they find valuable, the questions that still run through them. We don't look for linear careers or perfect answers — we look for situ

Introduction to the column: The Unconscious of History History doesn't end in textbooks. It survives in the institutions we inhabit, in the ways we think about care, in the language we use to describe those who suffer. The Unconscious of History is born from a simple conviction: that understanding how the past constructed the psychological categories we use today — of normality, deviance, therapy, exclusion — is a necessary clinical and intellectual act, not a nostalgic exerc

When Anthony Burgess published A Clockwork Orange in 1962, the scientific debate over the nature of human behavior was at its peak. Radical behaviorism, then dominant in experimental psychology, held that every human action could be explained — and therefore modified — through the principles of conditioning, regardless of internal mental states such as intentions, desires, or moral values (Skinner, 1953). Burgess builds his novel right at the heart of this tension, imagining

Over the past decade, ghosting — the sudden, unexplained termination of a relationship, typically mediated by dating apps, social networks, or messaging platforms — has become one of the most widely discussed relational phenomena of digital culture. The term, added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2015, has also gained academic attention: LeFebvre (2017) defines it as a relationship dissolution strategy that entirely avoids direct communication, in sharp contrast to the "tradition

Article written in collaboration with @neuro.sleepills Anyone who has ever had a lucid dream remembers that precise moment: the feeling that something doesn't add up, followed by a sudden realization — "I'm dreaming." It's an experience that sits on a borderline territory, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and one that has increasingly captured the interest of cognitive neuroscience in recent decades. What is a lucid dream Dreaming in general can be defined as a subject

Article written in collaboration with @tracce.psicologiche Aggression in young children is often experienced by parents as a problem to be corrected or eliminated. Psychoanalysis instead offers a more nuanced reading: aggression is not merely a behavior to be contained, but a complex phenomenon rooted in the very structure of drive and emotional life, one that takes on different meanings across the various stages of development. Freud: Drive Dualism and the Emergence of Aggre

For years, "get some exercise, it'll do you good" has been one of those pieces of advice given to almost everyone — vaguely true, but too generic to be genuinely useful in a clinical context. How much exercise? What type? Who does it work for, and who doesn't it help? In 2026, a series of high-level synthesis studies finally began answering these questions with a degree of rigor we didn't have before, shifting the status of physical exercise from "nice supporting advice" to a

When people talk about developmental psychology, they rarely think of a woman who practiced medicine before turning to education. Yet it is precisely at this intersection of medicine, psychiatry, and pedagogy that one of the most enduring contributions to our understanding of the child's mind was born. From the Psychiatric Clinic to the Casa dei Bambini Maria Montessori graduated in medicine in Rome in 1896, in an academic context where women's access to the medical professio

Newsletter created by Erika Marchioro Welcome to Questions That Open Doors. Here you will find a question, a story, or a reflection born from observing people, relationships, and those small things that often go unnoticed. You won't find definitive answers. The most important questions rarely serve to close something. They serve instead to open a space for listening, to look at a situation from a different perspective, or to rediscover something we had forgotten. Take all the