Gaetano Benedetti in his correspondence

Abstract

After presenting the scientific context in which he developed his research work, the author outlines Gaetano Benedetti's life and work and presents the relationship he himself developed with him, which led to Benedetti's giving him his correspondence as a gift. The correspondence allows us to document Benedetti's role on the international scene and his relational competence, that is, his human warmth and what the author calls his “bridging function.” The dialogical principle informs not only his work with his patients, but also his contacts with colleagues and the international connections essential for our work. His main legacy is the international network he established—which is also an essential ingredient of psychoanalysis.

Keywords:

• History of psychiatry and psychoanalysis
• international exchange and dialogue
• psychoanalytic training and identity

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Zvi Lothane (New York) for his interest and dialogical participation in my work.

Notes

¹To Helmut Junker we owe, for example, such precious books as Von Freud in den Freudianern (Junker, 1991), in which he investigated the ways in which psychoanalysts internalize the founder of their discipline.

²“It is a delightful book and a joy to own,” wrote Zvi Lothane (2007) in his review for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. As far as Fichtner is concerned, he introduced him to readers in the same review as “the indefatigable Freud researcher … compiler of the most comprehensive database on all aspects of Freud's life and work.”

³To Albrecht Hirschmüller we owe, for example, an important scientific biography of Breuer (1978) and a very good reconstruction of the young Freud's psychiatric training (1991).

⁴Ten years later, Bob Hinshelwood founded the journal Psychoanalysis and History, whose first editor was Andrea Sabbadini and whose present editor is John Forrester.

⁵The contribution of Wolfgang Loch has recently been revisited in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis by Jorge Canestri (2007) in his review of the anthology The art of interpretation, edited by Peter Wegner.

⁶One of the protagonists of our meetings was Paul Federn's son Ernst (1914–2007), who (together with his wife, Hilde Paar) was able to put us all in touch with the atmosphere in which the Viennese pioneers of psychoanalysis had worked and with their peculiar personalities, not to mention the first-hand knowledge he had of post-war American psychoanalysis, between 1948 and 1972 (Kaufhold, 2008).

⁷A former president of the DPG (1987–1995), Michael Ermann was–together with Jürgen Körner (DPG president 1995–2001)–the pioneer of the multidimensional work that brought the DPG to become a Provisional Society of the Executive Committee at the IPA Congress held in Nice in July 2001. One of the first documents of this long and still unfinished journey is his book Verstrickung und Einsicht (Ermann, 1996).

⁸The other reason for training at the SPP was of course Cremerius’ fascinating personality and his very sophisticated way of working with psychoanalytic patients, not to mention his profound knowledge of the history of psychoanalysis, and his original and innovative approach to analytic training. Johannes Cremerius, a member of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Vereinigung (DPV)—the German Psychoanalytic Association—and a very prolific author, was for many years one of the protagonists of the German psychoanalytic scene—not only for his scientific contributions, but also for his participation in the professional, cultural, and political debate.

⁹Also for this reason IFPS has a working group on the history of the Federation, which has been moving in the direction of putting together an archive, meant to enable future historians to reconstruct our history, that is, the series of initiatives, meetings, and scientific contributions promoted by the IFPS since its foundation in 1962. Of course, the items of Benedetti's correspondence dealing with IFPS will be part of the archive presently under organization. This committee, originally come to life as a result of the initiative of Carlo Bonomi, and is presently coordinated by Michael Ermann.

¹⁰A second brother, Eugenio, was born in 1928.

¹¹Born in Mannheim (Germany) as the son of Swiss parents in 1893, Bally graduated from Zurich Medical School in 1920 and trained as a psychiatrist under Eugen Bleuler. After training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Insitute (1924–1932), he went back to Zurich to work as a psychoanalyst. In 1940 he started introducing medical students to psychoanalysis, and in 1948 he joined the teaching staff of the Burghölzli, where Benedetti was at first one of his students. During the war, Bally had also had the chance of making Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–1982; one of the protagonists of post-war German psychoanalysis and a personal acquaintance of his) familiar with Freud's work. Between 1956 and his death in 1966, he was a professor at Zurich Medical School, and in 1961 he published a very clear introductory text to psychoanalysis—from which I gathered his professional profile (Bally, 1961). Last but not least, Bally was also Cremerius’ training analyst in the early 1960s.

¹²The reader can find a short and informative portrait of Heinrich Meng and his pioneering contributions (after a training analysis with Paul Federn, he cofounded the first Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute with Karl Landauer) in the Dictionaire de la psychanalyse (Roudinesco & Plon, 1997, pp. 664–665).

¹³Under the term nuova psichiatria (new psychiatry), I make reference to the psychiatric reform movement, headed by the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia (1924–1980), to which we owe the promulgation of the Psychiatric Reform Law No.180, of May 1978, which brought about the end (and later closure) of the old psychiatric hospitals and established the primacy of ambulatory over hospital psychiatry. Having graduated from medical school in 1981, the climate brought about by the nuova psichiatria played a very important role in my professional orientation.

¹⁴The translation from the German was, as with others in the article, made by the author of this paper. For a translation into English of the titles of the books and articles, see the reference section.

¹⁵Their ideas resonated well with the positive experience of the Free School based on the model articulated by Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling society (1970), which I had attended as an exchange student in a suburb of New York in 1972/1973. Only much later did I become aware of the individualistic nature of such an approach and of the weakness of the institutions coming out of it, which caused the Free School to dissolve some years later. The common denominator of the two models was the great emphasis on the liberty accorded to individual students to shape their own curriculum, according to their needs and personality. Similar to the French model of psychoanalytic training, the candidate had to undergo a personal analysis with a (good) analyst of his choice before starting the formal teaching at the SPP, which lasted 5 years and consisted of a weekly group supervision (which also characterizes the French model), theoretical courses, and individual supervisory sessions, with a series of supervisors that the candidate could also freely choose. The standard frequency required for both the personal analysis of the candidates and the work under supervision was three sessions per week. In 1996, Otto Kernberg wrote a paper entitled “Thirty methods to destroy the creativity of psychoanalytic candidates,” and I can certainly say that such a curriculum as the one offered at the SPP did not diminish but rather enhance my passion for psychoanalysis.

¹⁶I am still grateful to Pier Francesco Galli for his trust in my good intuition and ideas, as for example the large amount of space he allowed me to give, in his journal, to the work and ideas of Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000), the founder of relational psychoanalysis.

¹⁷As a matter of fact, I remember the case so well because I dealt with it again in a chapter of the volume edited in 2006 by Daniela Maggioni, which the ASP dedicated to Benedetti, and in which I included the written report of the case I had prepared at the time for Benedetti and a series of my own comments (Conci, 2006).

¹⁸And here is how Lilia D'Alfonso (2000, p. 19), one of Benedetti's closest collaborators in Milan, described him as a group supervisor: “To us all the suggestions of our teacher appeared characterized by an unusual clinical intelligence and, at the same time, by a human sensibility that would both cover all the material presented and, at the same time, make us feel embraced by him.”

¹⁹I remind the reader that Cargnello's commitment to the introduction of phenomenologic and existential psychiatry into Italy had also originally very much influenced the intellectual background from which Franco Basaglia's nuova psichiatra later emerged. The Italian reader can find a very good portrait of the author of Alterità e alienità (Cargnello, 1966, 1974) written by his former collaborator Ferruccio Giacanelli at http://www.pol-it.org/ital/cargnello3.htm

²⁰Thanks to Cargnello's love for precision and truth (which had already played a crucial role in his indefatigable search for the best possible translation of Binswanger's terminology into Italian), I also discovered that Todeslandschaften der Seele is not really the German version of Alienazione e personazione nella psicoterapia della malattia mentale (as it was presented to German readers), but that the book was, in the process of being translated (by Paul Rychner), more or less largely rewritten by Benedetti himself (and by Benedetti and Rychner together). I eventually confirmed this from the large correspondence that developed between them on this delicate topic at the time, which I found in one of Benedetti's folders.

²¹This means that, of the seven books by Sullivan published in the USA, five have been translated into Italian. Only two of them have ever been translated into German and Spanish (Das psychiatrische Gespräch/La entrevista psiquiatrica and Interpersonale Theorie der Psychiatrie/Teoria interpersonal de la psiquiatria) and only one into French (La schizophrénie: un processus humain).

²²The three volumes of the Italian edition of Arieti's American handbook of Psychiatry had very much contributed to the introduction of American dynamic psychiatry into Italy in the 1970s. After his graduation from medical school in his native town of Pisa, he had been able to take one of the last boats to the USA, where he trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis and became one of the most illustrious American dynamic psychiatrists of his time. The author of many books—for example, Interpretation of Schizophrenia and creativity, the magic synthesis—and founding editor (1973–1981) of the Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, his legacy has been revisted in several conferences held in Pisa through the joint effort of the American Academy and Organizzazione Psicoanalisti Italiani—Federazione e Registro (OPIFER).

At the first of such conferences, held in Pisa on October 3–4, 1998, under the title of “A psychiatrist between two cultures – Silvano Arieti, 1914–1981. The sense of psychosis,” Benedetti himself contributed a paper on Arieti's “Interpretation of schizophrenia” in which he also dealt with their own relationship and collaboration. Interpretazione della schizofrenia is also the title of the volume (edited by Rita Bruschi, 2005) of the papers presented at the VI Joint Meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry and OPIFER, held in Pisa on June 13–14, 2004.

²³To give a small example: I am sure that he would, if asked, have connected his way of conducting our group supervision in Milan (see above) to both Sullivan's concept of collaboration, meaning that the goal of a group leader is to make out of a group a good orchestra, and at the same time to Freud's concept of love, that is, to the process of uniting and binding together our energies as opposed to destruction, conceptualized in terms of the opposite process—as Freud talks about them in his important contribution of 1937 “Analysis terminable and interminable”, in the footsteps of the Greek philosopher Empedocles.

²⁴An important stimulus for the articulation of such a point of view—of the dialectical unity between his life and work—had been the biography that Paul Stepansky had composed of Margaret Mahler (Stepansky, 1988), with specific reference to the convincing way in which he showed how separation and individuation had been crucial themes of her life, before they became central concepts of her work on the psychological development of infants and children.

²⁵The German word means “a psychoanalyst certified to work inside the public health system,” which has been covering psychoanalytic psychotherapy up to 300 sessions for the last 40 years. It is possibly unique in the world, and it allows Germany to save much money on both drugs and hospitalizations.

²⁶Here is my English translation of his original Italian: “Dear colleague Conci, I congratulate you on the ‘European jump’ you made by moving from Trento to Munich—although your migration represents (as well as mine) a loss for Italy. But, thanks to your bilingual knowledge, you will always be an integration axis between the two cultures. I hope to visit you the next time I come to Munich. In the meantime receive my best regards and wishes. Your G.B.”

²⁷Or, to tell the story from a self-analytic viewpoint, I could also say the following: as far as my own father (who was born in the same year as Benedetti) is concerned, it was never easy to do things together with him, as easy as it gradually became with Benedetti.

²⁸My career as a Freud scholar started at the end of the 1980s as editor of the Italian edition of the young Freud's letters to Eduard Silberstein, which came out in the spring of 1991 through the Turin publisher Bollati Boringhieri (Conci, 1991). In 1995, I had also worked on the correspondence of the famous Italian neuropsychiatrist Beppino Disertori (1905–1992) (Conci, 1995b), also a man of great creativity and wide international contacts.

²⁹The fact that my partner and my mother participated in the visit also contributed to its success, by the establishment, I think, of a more personal and familiar—as opposed to just a professional—climate.

³⁰The crucial importance of Freud's letters and of his correspondence with pioneers such as Jung, Abraham, Ferenczi, Jones, Binswanger, Edoardo Weiss, and so on, was one of the ideas behind the last project of the Italian historian Michele Ranchetti (1925–2008), i.e. the series of volumes he had planned under the title Freud. Testi e contesti [Freud. Texts and contexts], in other words Freud's letters and other documents as a guide to his work. His letters to Jung are, for example, the context in which the concept of “countertransference” originally emerged (in the context of Jung's treatment of Sabina Spielrein), 9 months before he publicly talked about it (see Freud's letter to Jung of June 7, 1909; Freud & Jung, 1974; and his address to the Nuremberg Congress of March 1910, “The future prospects of psychoanalytic therapy”).

³¹As far as the languages of the letters are concerned, Benedetti wrote most of them in German, Italian, and English. He could also understand and write letters in French and understand the ones he received in Spanish—for example, from Argentina. English was of course the language used by most of his correspondents from countries such as Russia, China, and Japan, and from the Scandinavian countries – see his many Finnish and Norwegian friends.

³²Michael Schröter recently came to a similar conclusion dealing with Freud's letters to his first five children (Schröter, 2008): they are inspired by the same human quality and basic philosophical orientation that also represent the essence of psychoanalysis.

³³As the beginning of a reception of Freud's point of view by the Catholic Church came only in the 1960s, we can put Father Gemelli's position at the threshold between the rejection he publicly stood for and its acceptance, which his successor Leonardo Ancona made public in 1963 through a well-informed and favourable book entitled La psicoanalisi. Renamed by his own biographer, Giorgio Cosmacini, “God's Machiavelli,” Gemelli was a very complex figure of scientist (a pupil of the first Italian Nobel Prizewinner for Medicine, Camillo Golgi, 1843–1926, and one of the pioneers of Italian academic psychology) and—as the founder of the Milan Catholic University, which he headed for almost 30 years until his death in 1959—a politically very active representative of the Church. Cesare Musatti (1897–1979), the psychology professor who led the re-establishment of psychoanalysis in Northern Italy—together with the two ex-analysands of Edoardo Weiss, Nicola Perrotti (1897–1970) and Emilio Servadio (1904–1995), who re-established psychoanalysis in Rome—and who knew Gemelli very well, used to speak of his attitude toward psychoanalysis in terms of a great ambivalence (Musatti, 1976). For a detailed reconstruction of the original context of the establishment of psychoanalysis in Italy (and the literature mentioned in this footnote), see Conci (1996).

³⁴In his role of director of the Residency Program in Psychiatry at the Catholic University, Leonardo Ancona also played a crucial role in promoting the reception of psychoanalysis in several generations of Italian psychiatrists, including myself—a student of his between 1982 and 1986. A similar orientation had occurred in Italy at the time in the residency programs in psychiatry, directed by Dario De Martis and Fausto Petrella in Pavia, by Franco Giberti and Romolo Rossi in Genova, and by Adolfo Pazzagli in Florence—all IPA psychoanalysts. This circumstance (and its role in promoting a new generation of Italian analysts, coming from psychiatry) was also at the center of the interview I conducted with Stefano Bolognini (Conci & Bolognini, 2006), to which I therefore refer the reader.

³⁵Of course, we can speculate that a representative of the Zurich School such as Benedetti was easier for Gemelli to digest than any Freudian colleague closer to the Viennese roots of psychoanalysis. But—as I have showed in detail in my book on Sullivan (Conci, 2000)—it was mainly through the integration of psychoanalysis into psychiatry brought about by the Zurich School that Freud's point of view became of crucial interest to the North American psychiatrists who, like Abraham Brill, brought psychoanalysis to the USA—from Zurich, and not from Vienna. As Danilo Cargnello told me, this was also one of the reasons for Gemelli's interest in psychoanalysis.

³⁶Together with Harald Schultz-Henke, Werner Kemper, and Carl Müller-Braunschweig, Boehm was one of the Berlin psychoanalysts who ended up working inside the institute established by Matthias Göring in 1936 and who, after the IPA Zurich congress of 1949, stayed on in the DPG, that is, stayed on in it after its exclusion from the IPA—and did not join Müller-Braunschweig (1881–1958), who in 1950 founded the DPV, which was recognized by the IPA the following year in Amsterdam. Although I know most of the German literature on this very difficult phase of the history of psychoanalysis in Germany, I must admit that I do not have a clear idea about who Dr Boehm really was; Elisabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon (1997, pp. 134–135), for example, do not forget to cite the report that John Rickman wrote in 1946 about the survivors of the Berlin psychoanalytic scene, from which Boehm comes out in a rather bad light. On the other hand, the recent revisitation of the life and work of Alexander Mitscherlich published by Martin Dehli (2007) shows us how hard it is to come to a clear judgment on the protagonists of the time.

As an Italian psychoanalyst working in Germany who is familiar with the life and work of Benedetti, I tend to put the emphasis on the following two facts: after its exclusion from the IPA, the DPG group ended up being cut out of the international scene; in such a situation, Benedetti tried to help them out, to play the bridging function, which I know he often played in his life. I also know that it was because of the need to overcome such an isolation and to be again part of an international network that the DPG contributed to the foundation of IFPS, in Amsterdam in 1962.

³⁷A highly esteemed former president of the DPG (still living near Stuttgart), Friedrich Beese is also the author of an interesting paper on the history of the DPG after 1950, in which he partially explains the fact that IFPS never became attractive for most members of the DPG through “an insecurity about their own identity, similar to the one which one could sense in 1945 in the founders of the neopsychoanalytic group” (Beese, 1992, p.180).

³⁸Some years earlier (October 1974), Benedetti had been nominated to the position of Corresponding Member of the German Society for Psychiatry and Neurology (DPGN), a nomination that he commented on with the following words addressed to its president, Professor Hanns Hippius (Munich), on January 27, 1975: “I have given most of my papers at German universities and hospitals and most of the memories of my professional life have to do with them … I therefore experience the honour which you attribute to me not only as a personal recognition, but even more as the concrete expression of a profound sense of connection with the German colleagues, which I am particularly happy about.”

³⁹Fritz Meerwein, at the time psychoanalyst in Zurich, was a pioneer of the application of psychoanalysis to oncology, a new field of research about which he wrote an introductory text in 1981 (one of whose chapters was written by Dieter Bürgin, the new editor of the EPF Bulletin).

⁴⁰I can only suppose that the failure of the SPG to accept Benedetti as a full member, back in the 1960s, might have had to do with the debate going on at the time of whether or not his pioneering work in the field outside of the realm of the neuroses was to be considered psychoanalysis proper or only an application of psychoanalysis. As we know, a similar debate was also ongoing at the time with regard to psychoanalytic work with children, adolescents and groups.

⁴¹Here is what Carola Mann wrote about him in 2001: “With Jerry's death on November 2, 2000, an era of the International Federation has come to an end. He was the last survivor of the initial group of four (Erich Fromm, representing the Mexican Society, Igor Caruso, representing the Austrian Society, Werner Schwidder, representing the German Society, and Chrzanowski, representing the William Alanson White Society), who took the occasion of the first International Forum in Amsterdam in 1962 to found a new Arbeitsgemeinschaft, subsequently named the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies” (Mann, 2001). Born in Poland in 1913, he had grown up in Switzerland, gone to medical school in Zurich, and specialized in psychiatry at the Burghölzli, before migrating to New York in 1940, where he trained as a psychoanalyst at the White Institute, studying under its founders (Sullivan and Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Clara Thompson). The author of the first handbook on interpersonal psychoanalysis (Chrzanowski, 1977), he was able to put at the disposal of the Federation all his international contacts and connections, that is, his real passion for international exchange and dialogue, which is actually the essential ingredient of the life and growth of any international body.

⁴²1989 was also the year of approval by the Italian Government of a new legislation concerning the training of psychotherapists, a legislation that gradually brought an end to the organization of the training to which I had been exposed to (between 1988 and 1993), that is, to its higher clinical and scientific standards. Also because of this, the possibilities of international exchange that opened up through the membership of the ASP in the Federation could not be taken advantage of as much as Benedetti had wished.

⁴³Here is the short letter that Benedetti wrote to Norman Elrod on March 3, 1980, to congratulate him on the foundation of his institute, based in Zurich and in Kreuzlingen: “Dear Norman, I would like to heartily congratulate you on the foundation of your Institut für analytische Psychotherapie. I am convinced that, through such an institute, you will have the chance to transmit your rich psychotherapeutic experience, based also on a thorough psychological and philosophical background, and to thus realize something very useful and precious.”

⁴³An American psychologist from Missouri (where he had been born in 1928), Elrod moved to Zurich in the early 1950s and in 1954 started working at the Burghölzli, where he introduced group psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients. Trained as a Jungian (1957–1962), he left the Jung Institute after a conflict over his alternative teaching, and in 1971 founded the working group out of which the above-mentioned institute originated. To these facts (which I gathered from Hartmut Rostek's obituary of Elrod, who died in 2002; Rostek, 2003) I can add my memory of a man passionately struggling to combine psychoanalysis and politics, a struggle that brought him to collaborate also with several groups of Italian psychiatrists. I have too the memory of the very interesting workshop on Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, which he had offered with his group at the IFPS conference held in Athens in May 1996.

⁴⁴But did the IFPS inherit some of the tensions inherent in the differences between what we could call the two different concepts of psychoanalysis originally developed in Vienna and in Zurich? And second question: are such conflicts still alive and important?

⁴⁵As far as Paul Parin is concerned, a similar (and even more radical) Weltanschauung is present in his work, and actually inspired his whole life. For a very good description of his life and work, I refer the reader to Johannes Reichmayr (2005). As far as Marie Langer goes, I can refer the reader to Roudinesco and Plon (1997, pp. 612–615), who celebrate her as one of the founders of Argentinian psychoanalysis, the author of Maternidad y sexo [Motherhood and sex] of 1951, and as a very uncommon example of a politically committed psychoanalyst – all of which make of her in their eyes a grande dame de la psychanalyse.

⁴⁶Reading the words of warm appreciation that Wurmser addresses to Benedetti in his self-portrait (as I did after giving the paper in Tübingen last year) was a relief for me, as, when I read this part of the paper in Tübingen, some colleagues tended to downplay the rich relational and emotional dimension of these letters and to emphasize their formal character—of what, for example, takes the formal name of Gratulationsbrief, that is, congratulatory letter. Of course, knowing Benedetti well, it is much easier for me to understand the emotional tone of his letters, and I would be therefore curious to know how colleagues who have never seen him experience the letters quoted so far—especially the ones in this paragraph.

⁴⁷I know his professional biography and have read not only some of his papers and books, but also the very fascinating autobiography written by his father Max, himself a very good psychiatrist. After his retirement, Hans-Christian Müller also started working in the field of the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, which has allowed me to meet him more often.

⁴⁸Here is how a similar attitude also emerges from the following words, which Otto Allen Will (the American colleague cited in Benedetti's letter to Müller, who lived between 1911 and 1993, and was one of the best interpersonal analysts of his generation) addressed to Benedetti on August 27, 1975: “Dear Doctor Benedetti, this brief note is simply to say once again that I enjoyed very much the recent meeting in Oslo and learned a good deal from my contacts with colleagues. I was usefully informed by your presentation and particularly enjoyed our conversation at breakfast. I look forward to meeting you again, and perhaps this will be at the next conference which might be held in Basel. Best wishes to you. Sincerely yours.” In the anthology La tradizione interpersonale [The interpersonal tradition], which I edited together with Sergio Dazzi and Maria Luisa Mantovani in 1997, we also included Otto Will: in it the reader can find both a short biographical note and our translation into Italian of one of his best papers, i.e. “Human relatedness and the schizophrenic reaction” of 1959.

⁴⁹I owe this experience to Zvi Lothane, who in the summer of 1993 invited me to join him in a weekly seminar on President Schreber, which was held at Cerisy (Normandy), a couple of hours north-west of Paris, and had been organized by Schotte himself, with the participation of James Grotstein (Los Angeles) Wolfgang Blankenburg (Marburg), Antoine Vergote (Louvain), and Uwe Peters (Cologne)—a really memorable week! The proceedings of this seminar were edited in 1998 by Daniele Devrese, together with Lothane and Schotte themselves (Devrese, Lothane, and Schotte, 1998).

⁵⁰Like anyone writing about history (which is of course not the only ingredient of my paper), at the end of my work I feel, on the one hand, happy to have been able to tell the reader a story that is so important to me, and, on the other hand, I am of course left wondering whether or not the world that I tried to bring back to life (the world of my youth) can also be of interest for the reader. I hope the reader will tell.

⁵¹Winnicott's letters came out in 1987, 16 years after his death, under the title The spontaneous gesture. Selected letters of D. W. Winnicott, due to the initiative of his biographer, the American psychoanalyst Robert Rodman (Winnicott, 1987), and were promptly translated into Italian by the Italian colleague who knew him best, Eugenio Gaddini's (1916–1985) wife Renata.

Under the title The curve of life. Correspondence of Heinz Kohut, 1923–1981, his letters came out in 1994 (Kohut, 1994), edited by the historian of psychiatry Geoffrey Cocks—a friend of Kohut's son, also a historian. From them we learn, for example, how someone who was such a good friend of Anna Freud, who had even encouraged him to run for the presidency of the IPA in 1969, was listened to (and not expelled from the IPA) when he started developing his own ideas, at a time when psychoanalysis was not yet as pluralistic as it later become—that is, after Anna Freud's death in 1982, after Robert Wallerstein's presidential address at Montreal in 1987, etc.

⁵²Indeed, the unity between our work and the person we are is so important in our field that it should not make sense to cite any author without having also had a personal experience of him or her—by hearing the author give a paper, or by talking to him or her.

⁵³At this point, let me also say the following: I am very grateful to the colleagues of the DPG, who welcomed me both in Munich and at a national level, and who in 2002 accepted me as a member of their (our) society. As such, I can very much profit from this new, very exciting phase in the life of our society—from its being not only a Provisional Society of the IPA Executive Council,⁷ but also a member society of the European Psychoanalytic Federation. Such a new phase brings about a process of “internazionalization,” from which we will all benefit not only from the clinical, but also from the cultural (and political) point of view. It will bring us all closer together—and thus realize those ideals of peaceful international collaboration that I also believe to be part of Freud's legacy.