The latest issue of Studi Junghiani (N. 63 2026) opens its editorial with a 17th-century Persian treatise. Prince Muhammad Dārā Šikōh’s Majma’ al-bahrayn (“The Conjunction of the Two Oceans”), which set out to show that Islam and Hinduism’s revealed texts were, at their core, in agreement. The editors take the treatise’s central image, drawn from the Quranic story of Moses meeting the mysterious guide Hizr at the meeting point of two seas, as a way into this issue’s real theme: convergence, and the inner journey it makes possible.
Valerio Colangeli opens the issue with “Games of Lives! and the Universality of Images,” examining how symbolic play and role-playing games support adolescents in a psychiatric day-service setting, many of whom carry experiences of violence and abuse. Drawing on Christopher Vogler’s writing on the hero’s journey in myth and film, Colangeli frames the group work itself as a shared “emerging culture,” built through participants’ own images and cultural backgrounds.
Paolo Ferliga‘s “The Archetype of the Girl-Child in Dreams and the Process of Individuation” follows the dream material of a woman in her forties, tracing how a specific guiding figure, what Ferliga calls the “girl-child archetype,” related to Jung’s child archetype, oriented her individuation process. Ferliga argues that archetypal images, when they surface in dreams, carry a charge that can overwhelm the ego before it can be brought into conscious dialogue with it, and that the analyst’s task is to support the ego through that confrontation without letting the images’ transformative potential go unrecognised.
In the “Other Perspectives” section, Costanza Jesurum offers a Jungian reading of Mad Men, the acclaimed AMC drama set in 1960s New York advertising. Jesurum treats prestige television as a modern mythopoetic device, on par with 20th-century cinema, arguing that such series work on viewers the way dreams do, and that clinicians might productively treat a patient’s favourite films and shows as dream material in their own right. She reads the show’s morally opaque characters as embarked on their own hero’s journeys, and revisits the Jungian debate on animus and anima through Emma Jung’s writing on the need for a healthy feminine animus, connecting the show’s portrayal of women’s cultural maturation to men’s own recovery of their relationship to anima.
The issue also includes contributions from the fourth Migliorati Prize, dedicated to the late Augusto Romano, in which Luca Colombo, Valentino Franchitti, Alessandro Macrillò, and Gianfranco Pastore respond in dialogue to Romano’s earlier essay “Music and the Unconscious: Convergences,” first published in the journal’s 61st issue. The issue closes with two reviews: Luca Colombo on Deirdre Bair’s Jung: A Biography which is not yet translated into Italian, and Giancarlo Costanza on Costanza Jesurum’s Violenze di genere (Gender-Based Violence).
You can read all the articles in full here, in Italian.