Gaetano Benedetti, Johannes Cremerius, the Milan ASP, and the future of the IFPS

^†This is a revised version of the paper I gave at the XVIIth Forum of the IFPS in Mexico City on October 10, 2012, in the context of the panel “1962–2012: 50 years of IFPS.” The revision was made in November 2013. Gaetano Benedetti died in Bale on December 2, 2013, after I had finished the revision of the paper.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how the life, personality, and scientific work of Gaetano Benedetti and Johannes Cremerius shaped the original form and structure of the Milan Associazione di Studi Psicoanalitici (ASP), which they founded together with their pupils in 1971 and which became a member society of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) in 1989. The training analysis was substituted by a personal analysis to be finished before the beginning of the training proper; group supervision had and still has as much importance as individual supervision; transference and countertransference analysis are fundamental dimensions of both psychoanalysis and psychotherapy; and psychoanalysis can survive only in a context of interdisciplinary dialogue, empirical research, and social commitment. The author thinks that all these ingredients, which Benedetti and Cremerius contributed to the life of the Milan Scuola di Psicoterapia Psicoanalitica and ASP, could represent important resources, as far as the future of the IFPS is concerned.

Key words:

• Benedetti
• Cremerius
• Milan ASP
• analytic training
• IFPS
• future of psychoanalysis

Notes

^† This is a revised version of the paper I gave at the XVIIth Forum of the IFPS in Mexico City on October 10, 2012, in the context of the panel “1962–2012: 50 years of IFPS.” The revision was made in November 2013. Gaetano Benedetti died in Bale on December 2, 2013, after I had finished the revision of the paper.

¹ In my paper “Gaetano Benedetti in his correspondence” (Conci, 2008), I had given Benedetti's birth date as July 7, 1920. Only in connection with the celebration of his 90th birthday did I discover that Benedetti was actually born on June 26, but it was only on July 7 that his birth was officially communicated to the town hall of Catania. At the celebration, organized by the ASP in Milan on June 26, 2010, I gave a paper (Conci, 2012b) about his organization, together with Pier Maria Furlan, of the IXth Symposium for the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia held in Turin in August 1988 (see also below).

² For more detailed information about Benedetti's relationship with both Bally and Meng, see Conci (2008). In this, I deal also with Benedetti's relationship with Chrzanowski.

³ This is also the reason why Benedetti accepted my invitation to write a preface (Benedetti, 2005) to the German edition of my book Sullivan neu entdecken. In fact, having personally promoted the Italian edition of Sullivan's Schizophrenia as a human process (Conci, 1993), I had myself completed the task of promoting Sullivan's work in Italy, which he had started 32 years earlier (Benedetti, 1961).

⁴ Indeed, Benedetti (as Fachinelli had also done; see above) always remained an associate member of the IPA, and his name is still (November 2013) present in its roster.

⁵ Benedetti's Swiss pupil Carlo Calanchini described the work of supervision of psychiatric residents that Benedetti carried out for many years in Bale in his 2006 book chapter “Seminari a Basilea.” After this experience, Calanchini completed his analytic training within the Milan SPP and is still an ASP member.

⁶ These contributors were Laura Andreoli, Antonella Cannavò, Lilia D'Alfonso, Ciro Elia, Clelia Leozappa, Daniela Maggioni, Lauretta Ottolenghi, Francesca Pavese, Alberto Sibilla, and Carla Tomassina. Among other things that deserve to be mentioned about this book is the fact that Chapter 4, “Narcisismo: perdita, depressione, psicosi” (Narcissism: loss, depression, psychosis) represents the text of the paper given by Benedetti at the above-mentioned 1989 IFPS Forum in Rio de Janeiro. But the most important theme I would mention in connection with it is how Bendetti's readiness to interact with his pupils (including his sane narcissism) made of many of us active collaborators in the development of his work. As far as I am concerned, I can mention the afterword I wrote (Conci, 1997) to his book La psicoterapia come sfida esistenziale (originally published in German in 1992), in which I showed how the integrative nature of his therapeutic attitude was also grounded in the kind of person he was – as Patrick Faugeras also showed in 2000. Of course, the best demonstration of Benedetti's capacity to stimulate the creativity of his co-workers is his collaboration with Maurizio Peciccia – as he, for example, described it in 2000. From this came the book Sogno, inconscio, psicosi (Benedetti & Peciccia, 1995) and their revisitation of the psychodynamics of schizophrenia published in our journal (Peciccia & Benedetti, 1996).

⁷ Here is what Cremerius wrote in this regard in his afterword to the Italian edition of his 1994 self-portrait: “When I entered Pavia's Collegio Ghislieri in the fall of 1939, I could not imagine how important and meaningful such a step would have become in my life. Here my love for Italy was born. Italy became my second fatherland” (2000a, p. 116).

⁸ Riemann was at that time the most prominent analyst of the Munich Akademie für Psychotherapie und Psychoanalyse. Cremerius discussed at length in his self-portrait both his analysis and his relationship to him, as well as the historical background behind the Akademie itself, that is, the totally lacking elaboration of the Nazi past from which the leading group had come (Cremerius, 1994). After long years of work and heated (and constructive) discussions inside the Akademie, its history was eventually revisited in detail in the book edited in 2008 by Thea Bauriedl and Astrid Brundke.

⁹ The German Psychoanalytic Association had been founded in 1950 by Carl Müller-Braunschweig (1881–1958), who left the German Psychoanalytic Society after the society had been left out of the IPA at the 1949 IPA Congress, held in Zurich. The first important book on this very controversial topic was written by Regine Lockot (1985). Michael Ermann (1996) provided an important contribution to its re-elaboration; a recent reconstruction can be found in Bohleber (2012).

¹⁰ The very long and painful process of elaborating the involvement of German analysts in the Nazi regime, whose main form was their clinical work within the so-called Göring Institute (Cocks, 1985), eventually took place only in the 1980s. The 1977 refusal of the IPA to hold one of its next congresses in Berlin stimulated a group of analytic candidates to eventually document this history through an exhibition that took place at the 1985 IPA Congress held in Hamburg (Brecht, Friedrich, Hermanns, Kaminer, & Juelich, 1993).

¹¹ In fact, this is also the position that Otto Kernberg developed, starting with his 1985 paper “Institutional problems in psychoanalytic education” (which I also translated for Psicoterapia e scienze umane; Kernberg, 1987), and of which he is today – himself a former IPA president (1997–2001) – the most important spokesman. Here is what he wrote in 2006: “As mentioned before, the personal analysis of psychoanalytic candidates should be disconnected completely from the rest of psychoanalytic training, as is already the case in the French system” (2006, p. 1664). This is also why Kernberg was invited to give the paper “Training in psychoanalysis and dynamic psychotherapy today: conflicts and challenges” (Kernberg, 2011) at the celebration of the 45th anniversary of the foundation of Psicoterapia e scienze umane, which took place in Bologna on September 20, 2011.

¹² An even more detailed description and analysis of Cremerius's contribution to our training curriculum and to the atmosphere of our group can be found in Chapter 9, “Psychoanalytische Psychotherapie in Mailand,” of the posthumous volume Ein Leben als Psychoanalytiker in Deutschland, edited in 2006 by his close friend Wolfram Mauser. Here are Cremerius's words: “Since we did not want to repeat the hierarchical-authoritarian structure of the training institutes of the IPA, which we saw as a betrayal of the Enlightenment spirit of psychoanalysis, we decided to renounce to symbols of power like the role of ‘training analyst.’ We therefore limited ourselves to a functional structure composed of teachers and students. … This turned out to be very advantageous for the climate of the institute, which was free of the transferential tensions which usually burden analytic institutes for years. … This kind of organization of the training is very similar – as I later learned – to the one worked out by the French Psychoanalytic Association (A.P.F.). … In this way we also hoped to avoid the intellectual regression of the students” (Cremerius, 2006, pp. 275–277). In fact, the so-called “French training model” promoted by the APF was approved by the IPA in 2007 as one of its three official training models (Bohleber, 2011). Furthermore, in the fall of 2011, the Italian Psychoanalytic Society approved a modification of its statutes, according to which full SPI members may also conduct training analyses.

¹³ Such an Enlightenment vision also inspired Cremerius's view of the future of psychoanalysis, as he formulated it in the German paper “Die Zukunft der Psychoanalyse” (written in 1995), which gave the title to the collection of papers that came out in English in 1999, and in Italian (with Giorgio Meneguz as editor) in 2000 (Cremerius, 2000b).In fact, “Ein psychoanalytischer Aufklärer” was also the title of the review that Ludger Lütkehaus published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 2006 on the portrait of Cremerius that derived from the above-mentioned autobiography edited by Wolfram Mauser.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marco Conci

Author

Marco Conci, MD (Florence, 1981) and psychiatrist (Rome, 1986), is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Munich. He trained at the Milan Scuola di Psicoterapia Psicoanaltica between 1988 and 1993, and has been a member of the Associazione di Studi Psicoanaltici since 1996. He is also a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society, the Munich Akademie für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie, the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, and the International Psychoanalytic Association. He has been a member of the editorial board of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis since 1994 and Co-Editor-in-Chief since 2007.