The privileged link of psychoanalysis to spoken language does not necessarily facilitate communication among analysts and psychotherapists of different mother tongues. The Journal of European Psychoanalysis published since 1995 has long sought to overcome these linguistic barriers. Traditionally, it has introduced English readers to important European authors, as well as to authors of Latin American countries whose paradigms are close to European "styles." Freed of the editorial and political constraints that often govern the official organs of schools and institutions, the Journal of European Psychoanalysis has, for many years, regularly featured conversations with some of the most prominent and brilliant figures in contemporary psychoanalysis: highlighting debates and trends within psychoanalysis and related fields while remaining ever-sensitive to the practical, ethical, and theoretical implications of clinical practice. In Freud's Tracks collects some of the most engaging and provocative of these conversations, thus tracing a recent history of psychoanalysis in Europe while also evidencing the discipline's vital and vibrant connections with the fields of politics and social policy, science and philosophy, cultural studies and the social sciences."

Elvio Fachinelli (1928-1989) was a leading Italian psychoanalyst whose clinical, theoretical, and activist work resonated well beyond his discipline. In The Still Arrow, Fachinelli launches an interdisciplinary investigation ranging from anthropology to politics, and from the history of religions to the critique of ideology. Originally published in 1979, this book displays Fachinelli's eclectic methodology. The Still Arrow goes against Freud's attempt in Totem and Taboo to equate individual psycho-libidinal predicaments with those of whole societies. Yet, it argues that the difference between the two always remains one of degree, not of principle. The vexing problem of their relation is approached through an interrogation of time. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, individual obsessional neurosis is firmly connected to a repudiation of death. But, Fachinelli argues, comparable temporal strategies are also present at the group level, in disparate social and historical contexts, for instance, in the archaic transformation of the dead into ancestors and in what he names 'the fascist phenomenon'. From this perspective, history is not just the sum of all possible histories but also of impossible ones. Fachinelli delineates an innovative knowledge of time which brings together apparently distant events into a characteristic series. This first English translation of a book by Fachinelli, The Still Arrow introduces a major critical European voice to the larger readership.