*To the memory of Stephen A. Mitchell (1946–2000) and Luciana Nissim Momigliano (1919–1998), and to their love for and promotion of psychoanalytic dialogue.
“Have no doubt that there is a future for psychoanalysis in Italy too. You only have to wait for a suitable time,” wrote Freud to Edoardo Weiss (1889–1970), on November 1, 1923, responding to a letter in which the first Italian psychoanalyst had informed Freud of having successfully introduced the Italian psychologists, gathered together in Florence for their Fourth National Congress, to his new science (as we learn from Weiss’ book Sigmund Freud as a consultant, 1970). It actually took many years for psychoanalysis to become established in Italy and for Italian psychoanalysts to gain international recognition as important intellectual players in their field. It was to celebrate this achievement, coinciding with Antonino Ferro's election to the post of Editor for Europe of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (from No. 4/2003), that we decided to produce this special issue, Italian themes in psychoanalysis–International dialogue and psychoanalytic identity. This topic was also dealt with comprehensively in my interview with Stefano Bolognini for this journal (see No. 1/2006), and this special issue can also be seen as a continuation and amplification of that same interview.
Last but not least, I am also very happy to say that the common denominator of the new, creative situation of Italian psychoanalysis, and of the papers contained in this issue, is embodied in the process of “internationalization,” whose first protagonists and contributions had already been a central theme of my paper “Psychoanalysis in Italy: a reappraisal” (No. 2/1994). The bridges built between Italian and international psychoanalysis, the theme of this editorial, are the hallmark of this very exciting new development. As an introduction, let me go back to history and to Edoardo Weiss.
A native of Trieste (until 1918 part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, like my native Trent), where he had first heard about Freud, he went to Vienna in the fall of 1908 to study with him. After what turned out to be one of the first (and, for the time, very long) training analyses with Paul Federn (1871–1950), he became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1913, even before graduating from medical school. After the war, back in Trieste, he worked at the local psychiatric hospital for about a decade, introduced psychoanalysis to the Italian psychiatrists gathered in Trieste in September 1925 for their national congress, and, before moving to Rome in 1931, published Elementi di psicoanalisi [Basic concepts of psychoanalysis].
We can therefore take 1932 as the date psychoanalysis was established in Italy, that is, the year in which, together with a small group of colleagues, including his training analysands Nicola Perrotti (1897–1970) and Emilio Servadio (1904–1995), Weiss reconstituted the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (SPI), founded in 1925 by the psychiatrist Marco Levi-Bianchini (1875–1961), the first Italian translator of Freud. In the same year, Weiss also launched the Rivista italiana di psicoanalisi (1932–1934), on whose editorial board also sat Cesare Musatti (1897–1979), the only university professor of the group and (together with Perrotti and Servadio) one of the protagonists of psychoanalysis in Italy after the war. Recognized by the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) in 1936 in Marienbad, the small Italian group was dissolved by the Fascists (Weiss emigrating to the USA, at first to Topeka and later to Chicago) and was rebuilt only in 1946. Out of the interviews conducted by Paul Roazen (1936–2005) with Weiss in the mid-1960s in Chicago arose the book about him that I reviewed in Issue 1/2006 of this journal.
There were only six members that in 1946 organized in Rome the first national congress of the SPI (followed by a second in Rome in 1950), and its membership increased very slowly, to 20 by 1955 (the year in which Musatti refounded the Rivista di psicoanalisi), and 30 by 1963 (as we learn from “A letter from Italy,” published by Giana Petronio Andreatta and Stefano Bolognini in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1998). In other words, the “suitable time” envisaged by Freud for the development of psychoanalysis in Italy came only in 1969: the XXVIth IPA Congress held in Rome was followed by the final approval from the IPA of the Italian standards of training, which were formalized in the new bylaws of 1974.
In 1966, Michel David published La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana [Psychoanalysis in Italian culture, a history of the diffusion of psychoanalysis in Italian literature and culture (which became more influenced by it than Italian medicine and psychiatry), one of its most original overall conclusions being the following: “The strangest paradox was the fact that psychoanalysis appeared as a Teutonic product after the first world-war, as a Jewish product at the time of Mussolini's rapprochement with Germany, and as an American product when the U.S. troops landed in Italy” (for this quotation, see my above-mentioned paper of 1994).
In fact, the original sense of lack of awareness of the foreign sources of psychoanalysis, which lasted many years, was compensated by an extraordinary wealth of translations of books from all psychoanalytic traditions, such that the gradual digestion and assimilation of psychoanalysis contributed to the very recent founding of an “Italian School of psychoanalysis,” described in this issue. No wonder that Adam Limentani (1913–1994), the Roman Jew and London psychoanalyst who headed the IPA between 1983 and 1986, wrote about his first visits to Italy in the mid-1960s: “I soon realized that most of those present were much better read than I was.... Those who work in a so called psychoanalytic underdeveloped country ingest foreign and local literature on a very large scale.”
I should also add that it took our culture and society many years to emancipate themselves not only from the biased antimodernity attitude of the Catholic Church and from the antiscientific brand of idealistic philosophy represented by Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), but also from Mussolini's (1922–1943) nationalistic and obscurantist regime. Only in 1961 and 1971 were Italian university students able to graduate in sociology (Trent) and psychology (Padua and Rome) respectively! This was also the reason why neither Weiss nor Limentani came back to Italy after the war, and the same is true also for Silvano Arieti (1914–1981), a Jew from Pisa who became one of the leading American psychoanalysts of the 1960s, and – mutatis mutandis – for Gaetano Benedetti (born in Catania in 1920), who went to Zurich in 1947 to specialize in psychiatry and then trained as a psychoanalyst in the Swiss Society. In the 1960s and 70s, several Italian colleagues chose to receive their training abroad after graduating from a university in Italy: the two I know best are Riccardo Steiner and Andrea Sabbadini (who both went from Milan to London, where both became quite prominent internationally).
It is no wonder that, in his 1992 report on the situation of psychoanalysis in Italy, Arnaldo Novelletto presented Eugenio Gaddini (1916–1985; SPI President 1978–1982) as “the first in Italy to actively do everything possible in order to adapt the psychoanalytic organization and its various standards (organs and society regulations, congresses, journal, teaching activities) to the standards of the IPA” It was also in connection with this climate (but also for other complex reasons) that a group of analysts headed by Jacqueline Amati-Mehler and Jorge Canestri (who had much stronger ties with the international analytic community than the average Italian analyst) left the Italian Society in the summer of 1992 and founded the Italian Psychoanalytic Association (which was promptly recognized by the IPA, and which nowadays has about 50 members).
In the early 1990s, the very long work of assimilation and re-elaboration of a number of foreign analytic traditions started yielding the first good and satisfying fruits, as shown by the positive reviews received by two books. The first book was the collection of papers by Eugenio Gaddini, A psychoanalytic theory of infantile experience, edited in 1992 by Adam Limentani, which was characterized as “an important book” by the reviewer of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1993. This was the very first book by an Italian psychoanalyst (after Weiss) to circulate widely outside of Italy and to find such a positive appreciation, 70 years after Freud's forecast. Incidentally, only one of the more than 20 books written and/or edited by one of the most famous Italian analysts of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Franco Fornari (1921–1985; SPI President 1974–1978), and one of the Italian pioneers of the Kleinian School, had been ever published in English – as The psychoanalysis of war – and the PEP-disc connects his name only to a two-page discussion of a paper by Donald Meltzer from 1968. The second book was published (also in 1992) by a former analysand of Fornari (and of Musatti), Luciana Nissim Momigliano (1919–1998), and by Andreina Robutti, with the title Shared experience. The psychoanalytic dialogue: “I can only hope that more work of the Italian school is being translated into English” are the words with which Donna Orange concluded her review of it in the New York journal Psychoanalytic Books.
Last but not least, 1992 was also the year of approval of the third and last statute (after 1961 and 1974), combining the scientific autonomy of the 10 Regional Centers with the central control on training exerted by the four National Training Institutes, and guaranteeing the very good developments that were to follow – and which allowed the SPI in 1998 to reach 186 full members, 415 associate members, and 312 analysts-in-training.
What was the key to these developments and the ones that followed, in the same direction, up to the present, to the point of producing the “up to only a few years ago unthinkable” phenomenon (as Stefano Bolognini described it in our interview) that “Italian analysts are now invited abroad and foreign journals publish our papers”? After years spent reading foreign literature, foreign analysts started being invited to Italy, and a process of real discussion and exchange began to develop, an exchange that has gradually become a reciprocal process of mutual influence. This is what we can learn, for example, from Vincenzo Bonaminio's introduction to The Freudian moment, in which he presents Christopher Bollas as “a part of Italian psychoanalysis” and as acknowledging that “the Italian other is the receptive unconscious to which he speaks,” a phenomenon depending on the fact that “Italian psychoanalysis, though informed by many different schools of analytic thought, has remained open, with an independent mind.” In other words, having emancipated themselves from their “mother tongue,” and having come in live contact with the representatives of the various analytic traditions present on the international scene, Italian colleagues were able to develop a pluralistic psychoanalysis, and to do it right at the time when, after the disappearance of the last pioneers (the last being Anna Freud, who died in 1982), international psychoanalysis eventually evolved in the same direction. But here is the crux of the story, in Bonaminio's words:
I first met Christopher Bollas in 1977. By invitation of Andreas Giannakoulas, who, together with Adriano Giannotti founded a Training Programme in Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy inside the University of Rome that has been running since 1976, a number of outstanding psychoanalysts visited the Institute of Child Neuropsychiatry to contribute their expertise to the clinical training of the students. Among them, Paula Heimann, Frances Tustin, Marion Milner, Adam Limentani, and Christopher Bollas himself have left the most durable traces of their influence on what has become our clinical tradition over the years.
1977 was also the year of Wilfred Bion's (1897–1979) visit to Italy, made possible by the contact he had had for years with his “Italian ambassador,” Francesco Corrao (1922–1994; SPI President 1969–1974), by the fact that all his books had been promptly translated into Italian, and, last but not least, by having his daughter Parthenope Bion Talamo (1945–1998), married to an Italian musician and psychoanalytic candidate in Turin, at his side as a translator! Published in Italy in 1985, his Italian seminars came out in English only in 2006, and here is what Antonino Ferro wrote about them in his review for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (No. 2/2007):
In The Italian seminars, there is particular emphasis on the enormous value of everything we can detect with our senses in the session. The rest counts for very little, just as theories count for very little once they have been formulated, because they tend to become rigid and lack fluidity. So, the source of our knowledge can only be the patient and the meeting with him, in which we seek to allow the germ of an idea to come to light.
The similarly titled Herbert Rosenfeld at work. The Italian seminars came out in English in 2001, discussing the seminars held by Herbert Rosenfeld (1910–1986) in Rome and Milan between 1978 and 1985. On the other hand, a crucial role in promoting Bion's (and also Rosenfeld's) ideas in Italy, and in exerting the kind of bridging function that allowed Italian psychoanalysis to move to the foreground of the international scene, was played by Donald Meltzer (1922–2004) and by Salomon Resnik. For both of them, Italy was (and is still, for Resnik) a kind of an adoptive country in which they started regularly working as teachers and supervisors about 40 years ago. Meltzer's work in Italy gave rise to several books (e.g. Silvia Fano Cassese's introductory book to his work), and several of Resnik's books even have Italy, chiefly Venice, as their frame of inspiration and action (see, for example, The theatre of the dream). A very fine document from the extremely creative international network brought to and created by Resnik in Italy is the book Forme di vita forme di conoscenza [Forms of life, forms of knowledge], edited in 2000 by his Venetian collaborator Enrico Levis.
An important bridging function was also played by the transplantation to Italy of the Tavistock experience and training, thanks to the initiative of Gianna Polacco Williams (see also Simonetta Adamo's interview with her in Number 55 of the journal Quaderni di psicoterapia infantile, edited by, among others, Franco Borgogno and Antonino Ferro, a very interesting special issue on “The history of child psychoanalysis in Italy,” edited by Maria Luisa Algini). Last but not least, let us not forget the role of putting the Italian community in touch with the international psychoanalytic community, played by an analyst of great international stature, Ignacio Matte Blanco (1908–1995), who had moved to Rome in 1966, and whose bilogic thought still lies at the center of well-attended international conferences (the next, number six, taking place at the end of August 2008).
Before turning to the content of this current issue, let me take up the last chapter of my story: the organization by several Italian groups of a whole series of very well-attended international congresses meant further to set forth and promote the work of classical authors such as Winnicott, Bion, and Ferenczi. Very well known in Italy (thanks also to the pioneering work of his good friend Renata Gaddini), Donald Winnicott's (1896–1971) work was the theme of the international congress held in Milan in April 1997 (about which the present scientific secretary of the Italian Society, Anna Ferruta, wrote a detailed report, published in the Rivista di psicoanalisi, No. 3/1997); the main papers were published in the anthology La tradizione winnicottiana [The Winnicottian tradition], edited by Mario Bertolini, Andreas Giannakoulas, and Max Hernandez. It is a great pleasure to see a creative revisiting of the work of such a seminal author by a number of well-known international colleagues (including A. Green, R. Zak Goldstein, and D. Tuckett) take place in Italy.
The same is true for W.R. Bion: Past and future. International centennial conference on the work of W.R. Bion, which took place in July of the same year in Turin, under the presidency of Bion's daughter Parthenope and attended by about six hundred participants. Half of these were from abroad, and the main papers had all been prepublished on the Internet (as we can read in the report of Michele Bezoari, published in the Rivista di psicoanalisi, no 4/1997). Of the many highly interesting papers presented at the conference, a collection of which was published in Italian in the book Lavorare con Bion (English edition W.R. Bion. Between past and future), edited by Parthenope Bion Talamo, Franco Borgogno, and Silvio Merciai, I want to single out the following. First is the paper by Claudio Neri on “Bion in Italy” (centered around the specific aspects of the particularly positive reception of Bion's work in Italy, included some affinities between it and the Italian national character), and the paper by Borgogno and Merciai, on the evolution of their approach to Bion's work – as well as his daughter's paper, in which she compares Bion as father with Bion as author. Incidentally, as far as “Bion in Italy” is concerned, let me also note the still relevant and basic publication on the reception of Bion's work in Italy: the special issue of the Rivista di psicoanalisi No. 3–4/1981 (with papers by the aforementioned Corrao, Gaddini, Matte Blanco, Nissimo Momigliano, and Fornari; and by Mauro Mancia, Leonardo Ancona, and two past Presidents of the Italian Society, Giovanni Hautmann and Giuseppe Di Chiara, as well as the present President, 2005–2009, Fernando Riolo). Let me also mention the very successful latest International Bion Conference, organized in Rome by a group chaired by Giorgio Corrente, at the end of January 2008.
I can now turn to Ferenczi (1873–1933) and mention the Seventh International Ferenczi Conference (after Paris, Budapest, New York, São Paulo, Madrid, and Tel Aviv), organized by Franco Borgogno in Turin in July 2002, to whom we also owe a special issue of this journal, No. 1–2/2004, with the main papers edited by him, under the title “Why Ferenczi today?” (a very detailed report of which, written by Barbara Piovano, appeared in No. 4/2002 of the Rivista di psicoanalisi). In addition, we can consider the international conference “La catastrofe e i suoi simboli. Il contributo di Ferenczi alla teoria psicoanalitica del trauma” (“Catastrophe and its symbols. Ferenczi's contribution to trauma theory”), organized by Carlo Bonomi in Florence in November 1999, whose proceedings, edited by Bonomi and Borgogno, also contain a paper by the Italian pioneer of the rediscovery of Ferenczi's legacy, the Bologna colleague Glauco Carloni (1926–2000; SPI President 1982–1986). As Barbara Piovano reminds us in her report, the open and lively dialogue among representatives of a spectrum of analytic models and traditions, all interested in finding connections with Ferenczi's work, made the 2002 conference into an unforgettable event, which Claudio Eizirik, the present IPA President, proposed to adopt as a model for any IPA initiative!
And now to the texts in the present issue, starting with “‘Objects’ and ‘characters’ in psychoanalytical texts/dialogues” by Antonino Ferro and Giovanni Foresti (both living and working in Pavia, a lovely old university town, half an hour south of Milan). It is no wonder that Ferro was the first member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society to publish in this journal, founded by Jan Stensson in 1992, that is, the paper written with Michele Bezoari and Pierluigi Politi (both also from Pavia), “Listening, interpreting and psychic change in the analytic dialogue” (see No. 1/1994). In this, the authors emphasized the intersubjective and dialogical nature of the interpretative work carried out in analysis and introduced the concept of “weak (or unsaturated) interpretation.” In 2001 Ferro introduced us to Barbara Piovano's Parallel psychotherapy with children and parents, whose “call to research, above and beyond what is already known … permeates the whole book” (ibid, p. 89) – and also characterizes the paper which our Roman colleague put at our disposal for this issue (see below). The following year, we were able to publish the contribution that Ferro had presented at the 1999 IPA Congress in Santiago de Chile, “Narrative derivatives of alpha elements: clinical implications,” in which he showed us how we can take the “narrative derivatives” produced by the patient as signals monitoring the functioning of the analytic couple.
By then, not only his first book, The bipersonal field: Experiences in child analysis, but also his second, In the analyst's consulting room, had been published in English (1999 and 2002; Italian publication 1992 and 1996). These were followed by Seeds of illness, seeds of recovery (2004; Italian 2002) and Psychoanalysis as Therapy and Storytelling (2006; Italian 1999), which were reviewed together by Irene Cairo (New York) in No. 5/2007 of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. The reviewer captures well the theoretical foundations and clinical virtues of Ferro's unique contribution, focusing on “analyst and patient as two authors in search of characters,” and on the analytic process as “based on the transformative capacity of human relationships.”
Very characteristic of Ferro's perspective is his creative, dialectical, and paradoxical relationship to theory. His solid knowledge of Bion's work, narratology, and the Barangers’ field theory are all necessary for understanding the language he speaks and his clinical method, inspired by a Hegelian Aufhebung of theory: theory exists only to be overcome, to be put temporarily aside, to be put in the background. In Ferro's words (see the very last paragraph of his contribution on “Bion: theoretical and clinical observations,” published in No. 6/2005 of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis): “A factor of evolution and transformation is the analyst's capacity to be in unison with his patient. Every time that the analyst mentally pairs up with his own theory, he creates with it what is for all intent s and purposes a primal scene that excludes the live contact of minds, which is the only factor of growth.” This is the frame of mind, further elaborated by Ferro in his two latest books in Italian (Tecnica e creatività [Technique and creativity], 2006, and Evitare le emozioni, vivere le emozioni [Avoid emotions, live emotions], 2007), which I would recommend to readers of the paper in this issue. This represents a very good reformulation, written with a younger colleague, of the many steps he made during the many years of thoughtful and creative work since his very first analytic paper of 1985.
Before discussing the next paper of this issue, let me emphasize the epistemological dimension that informs the authors’ systematic comparison of the object as a psychoanalytic category, and the character as a figure in the story, that is, their definition of what they call “the formula text/dialogue,” as a concept meant to contribute to the articulation of that comparative methodology of observation, inference, and argument that David Tuckett has been developing in the last 15 years. In fact, Antonino Ferro (together with Roberto Basile, and eight more European colleagues), also belongs to the working group (chaired by Tuckett himself) that has just produced the precious volume Psychoanalysis comparable and Incomparable, which was recently (March 13, 2008) presented at the Annual Conference of the European Psychoanalytical Federation, held in Vienna.
A similar epistemological sensibility also informs the paper “When our words disturb the psychoanalytic process: from resistance as a defense to resistance as an interactive process,” by Giuseppe Civitarese and Foresti himself, both belonging to the group of colleagues working in Pavia in creative contact with Ferro, which last year produced the volume Sognare l'analisi. Sviluppi clinici del pensiero di W.R. Bion [Dreaming analysis. Clinical developments of W.R. Bion's thought]. Given the fact that Giuseppe Di Chiara (SPI President 1993–1997), in a paper given in Trieste in December 1985, showed how the three themes of (1) a better understanding of the patient's inner world, (2) a revision and comparison of the theories we use, and (3) a reflection on the person of the analyst and on the analytic couple at work, represent the three main dimensions of the scientific work conducted for years in the Italian Society, it is small wonder that these same three themes are very well represented in this paper. Starting from how two of their patients (Marcello and Carla) experienced their jarring, that is, dissonant, unhappy, interventions, the first feeling attacked and the second developing a submissive reaction, our colleagues show us how we can learn from our errors by reconceptualizing resistance not only in terms of a “safety valve for the individual's identity,” but also as an indicator of the work being done by the analytic couple. Considering the role played in our work by the attention we pay to patients’ dissonances, which we can take as a Bionian “selected fact” around which to create a new “container,” the authors refer to the technical approach articulated by the Milan analyst Giovanna Giaconia. A very interesting aspect of the perspective developed by them is also their utilization of and reliance on a whole series of North American authors, going from Heinz Kohut and Roy Schafer to Philip Bromberg and Lewis Aron, with particular regard to Aron's very good book of 1996, A meeting of minds: Mutuality in psychoanalysis (published in Italian in 2004).
Barbara Piovano – who has already contributed to this journal through a discussion of a paper by Christiane Ludwig-Körner's on parent–infant psychotherapy (see No. 4/2003) – offers us, through her paper “The function of the analyst's boundaries in the psychoanalytic relationship,” not only a fascinating clinical case, but also the opportunity to see how she combined the theoretical and clinical perspectives that she had experienced in her training with the points of view with which she came in touch during her subsequent professional evolution. In her own words (but with my emphasis):
I would like to stress that my patient's movement towards the experience of a containing environment meeting her need for growth and transformation... paralleled the changes in my inner relationship with my own theories and the broadening of my theoretical frame of reference. My increased freedom to cross the boundaries between theories, integrating traditional concepts... with more recent ones (enactments, intersubjectivity, self-disclosure), allowed me to understand the clinical material from various different perspectives and to meet my patient at the various levels of her psychic organization.
What we learn from Stefano Bolognini's paper “Reconsidering narcissism from a contemporary, complex psychoanalytic view” is how the turning point in the treatment of his patient Egidio, that is, of his “indisputable right not be disturbed,” also came about only – after years of patient and somewhat frustrating work – once the analyst had found “the right voice” for dealing with the patient's narcissism, dealing with it in a way that the latter could accept and profit from. A path between the contrasting dangers of complicity and challenge is also the essence of the therapeutic stance toward the narcisstic patient which Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) had proposed in his 1988 book Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. An integration (published in Italian in 1993) – whom I also would like to remember, in this Editorial, as the founder of the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1991. But Bolognini enters on tiptoe not only the world of his patients (of Manuela, the second patient, even more than of Egidio), but also the theoretical perspectives on narcissism developed by many authors, in the belief that “each author has placed a significant brick to create the analytic house in which we live and work.” The dialogical attitude that informs his paper and characterizes his way of working has allowed him, as I see it, to develop a point of view that well represents the specific orientation of contemporary Italian psychoanalysis. I am making reference not only to his resonance and openness to the single patient as being one of the essential paths to analytic change, but also to his belief that through serious work of comparison and integration of the plurality of analytic perspectives at our disposal we can come to a “shared, ‘collective’, technical-scientific evolution … actually modifying most analysts, beyond their official, conscious adherence to a theoretical or other type of model.”
In the field of medicine, we used to speak of such an attitude as the primato della clinica del singolo paziente (the clinical aspect of the single patient first!), which represents not only a common denominator of the Italian papers of this issue (and might as well reflect a peculiarity of the Italian way of living and relating!), but also an integral part of the legacy of another colleague I know rather well. This is what the reader will learn in the next paper of this issue, my paper “Gaetano Benedetti in his correspondence,” in which I present in detail – through his life, his work, and his correspondence – what I consider to be another very important aspect of his legacy, the necessary international character of psychoanalysis.
This very goal brought the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and Patrizio Campanile, the editor of the Rivista di psicoanalisi, to put together some of the best articles published in their journal in 2006 in The Italian psychoanalytic annual, whose first volume (2007), with the title Freud after all, I have also reviewed in this issue. Fabiano Bassi is the author of a very well-written review of Carlo Bonomi's fascinating book Sulla soglia della psicoanalisi. Freud e la follia infantile [On the threshold of psychoanalysis. Freud and the insanity of the child], which is also very much in tune with the scope of this monographic issue. After assimilating the very rich international historiographical tradition dealing with the origins of psychoanalysis, the author articulated in this “not only brilliant and erudite, but also entertaining” book (as Bassi writes), a very original and stimulating perspective, which throws a new light on the history and the nature of Freud's “discovery” and legacy.
Last but not least, to Zvi Lothane we owe a short but very accurate review of the interview conducted by the Canadian historian of psychoanalysis Christopher Fortune with Franco Borgogno, himself a protagonist of the new international turn of Italian psychoanalysis, the focus of this issue. As a matter of fact, together with my colleague Christer Sjödin, I am also happy to welcome Borgogno as one of the two new associate editors of our journal – the other being Eystein Victor Va°penstad, from Oslo. The same spirit that animates my reconstruction of Benedetti's life and work (and of my relationship with him as a participant-observer) is also what gave rise to The Vancouver interview, which inaugurates a new and very interesting trend among analysts – a trend which Freud himself actually pioneered in the Selbstdarstellung, his autobiographical study of 1924. Since the relationship between our life and our work is an essential dimension of our professional life, I think the time is ripe for our generation to now follow in Freud's footsteps!
Notes
*To the memory of Stephen A. Mitchell (1946–2000) and Luciana Nissim Momigliano (1919–1998), and to their love for and promotion of psychoanalytic dialogue.