The girl who committed hara-kiri and other clinical and historical essays

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Notes

1. Around the fact that the interpersonal point of view was not really invented by Sullivan, but actually “discovered” by him (as it was an already existing point of view that had not previously been sufficiently taken into consideration) centered Stephen Mitchell's important paper “The intrapsychic and the interpersonal: different theories, different domains or historical artifacts?” (1988). For the ways in which Freud himself was able to adopt, in his clinical work, an interpersonal point of view, see Zvi Lothane's paper “Freud and the interpersonal” (1997) and my own book Sullivan revisited – life and work (Conci, 2012).

2. There is a further important historical note here. As Raffaela Pagano (2012) suggests in her essay on Borgogno's book, the “depriving family,” what he talks about so much in his work might have also to do not only with his own family of origin, as he openly states in the interview cited above, but also with his own experience as a candidate in Milan, at a time (several years before the above-mentioned “interpersonal turn” of Nissim Momigliano) in which the training offered by the Italian Society was – in some aspects – rather traditional and hierarchical.

3. Here is the way in which Rudnytsky places Borgogno in terms of our contemporary psychoanalytic landscape: “As the intellectual leader of the eclectic band of intrepid Ferenczians, we find in Borgogno a confluence of the ‘Italian school’ inspired by Bion that is gaining increasing prominence in contemporary psychoanalysis and the London-based Independent tradition that runs through Winnicott to, in Borgogno's felicitous phrase, such ‘founders of future discursiveness’ as Christopher Bollas, Thomas Ogden, and Michael Parsons” (Rudnytsky, p.XIV).