The Author highlights the germinative nuclei of Eugenio Gaddini’s analytical thought con-tained in his paper On Imitation. In particular, starting from his innovative distinction between the psycho-sensorial area and the psycho-oral area and from the different early psychical processes connected, she ex-plores the appearance in the dreams of "difficult" patients of two distinct groups of characters who engage the dreamer in border’s wars concerning the limit of the Self: the "narcissistic gang" described by Rosenfeld H. (1987) and the "gang of impostors". She dwells on the latter which is more primitive than the other and is fuelled by an imitative hallucination closer to "the thing". The author’s thesis is that in the dream self-aspects are duplicated with a fixed and col-ourless smile - as imprints of pathological imitative perceptions, memory traces of the inter-action with the primary object physically present, but emotionally absent.
Keywords: Primitive pathological imitation, fusional magical identity, psycho-sensorial area, psycho-oral area, oneiric border’s wars, narcissistic gang, band of imposture