Gaetano Benedetti, co-founder of the ISPS with Christian Müller (1921–2013) in 1956, died in Riehen/Basel (Switzerland) on 2 December 2013, at the age of 93.
On 13 December he was buried in the cemetery close to his home, beside his wife Annette, who had suddenly and unexpectedly died on 25 February 2004, and a Protestant service took place at the Riehen Church, at which more than 200 people convened. His children Christoph, Conrad, Jürg and Dorothea remembered him as a sweet and very busy father, who had to struggle for much of his life against the handicaps brought about by the successful operation of a cranial nerve tumor at the age of 40, and whose last years of life were very much shadowed by the death of their mother.
Benedetti’s colleague Raymond Battegay, who had known him since 1956, and had worked with him at the Basel University Department of Psychiatry, emphasized “the revolution in psychiatry” which Benedetti brought about through his humane, scientific and optimistic approach to patients diagnosed with “schizophrenia”. Maurizio Peciccia thanked him for the therapeutic and research work done together for the last 25 years, one of the outcomes of which was the foundation in Perugia (Italy) of the Benedetti Institute, a training institute centered around his teaching and legacy. Eugenia Lamparelli remembered Benedetti as a very open, generous and thoughtful analyst and thanked him in the name of all his patients. Brian Martindale, the current ISPS Chairperson, thanked him on behalf of everyone in ISPS, which still works according to the interdisciplinary and international criteria set forth by its founders, and named him “the Mandela of psychosis”. Marco Conci thanked Benedetti in the name of both the Milan Associazione di Studi Psicoanalitici, which he had founded together with Johannes Cremerius (1918–2002) in 1971, and which became an essential setting and motor for the development of his ideas, and of the German Psychoanalytic Society, of which he had become a training analyst in the 1970s and a honorary member in 1983. Last but not least, Patrick Faugeras, the French colleague who translated Benedetti’s masterpiece 1983 Todeslandschaften der Seele (Benedetti, Citation1983) into French in 1995, reminded us how important it is to keep translating and publishing Benedetti’s work on an international scale.
Born in Catania on 26 June 1920, as the oldest of the three sons (Calogero, 1921, and Eugenio, 1929) of a famous surgeon and of a very well-educated and religious mother, Gaetano Benedetti grew-up experiencing the contradictions between the aristocratic character of his early life (he and his older brother were privately taught at home until the age of 14) and the democratic ideas of his parents and extended families, who all contributed to the anti-fascist front. As he wrote in his 1994 autobiography (Benedetti, Citation1994), many reasons motivated him to study medicine (at the University of Catania), but his sympathy for and empathy with psychiatric patients was the most important one. Because psychiatry was not an autonomous discipline in Italian medical education at the time (incorporated as it was in neurology, a situation which lasted until the mid-1970s), Benedetti decided to move to Switzerland (the European country with the best psychiatric tradition, and the country where his own father had grown up as a child), and in 1947 started working as a “voluntary assistant” at the Zurich University Psychiatric Hospital, the famous Burghölzli. This was the turning point of his professional and personal life. Manfred Bleuler (1903–1994), the son of Eugen (1857–1939), who had coined the term “schizophrenia” in 1911, and his father’s successor as head of the Burghölzli), soon discovered Benedetti’s ability to relate to his patients. Manfred was later to write, in the only anthology of Benedetti’s papers ever published in English, “Benedetti’s empathy for his patients was like that of Eugen Bleuler which at this time still pervaded the atmosphere of the Klinik” (Bleuler, Citation1987).
While at the Burghölzli Benedetti met Annette Straub, whom he married in 1949. Manfred Bleuler helped to launch Benedetti’s research career by sending him to the USA in 1950/1951 (where he also came into contact with the research group founded by Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann). Bleuler also later helped him to become Heinrich Meng’s successor as a Professor of Mental Hygiene in Basel (1957). Benedetti’s training in Zurich also included an I.P.A. training analysis with Gustav Bally (1893–1966), after which he joined the International Psychoanalytic Association as an Associate Member – a status which he kept all his life.
Christian Müller had also contributed pioneering papers on the psychotherapy of schizophrenia in the mid-1950s. In 1956, Benedetti and Müller organized, in Lausanne, the first of 18 International Symposia on the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia (which now take place every two years, most recently in Warsaw this year), and laid the groundwork for the creation and development of ISPS as a stable international network. Benedetti himself – the more active of the two founders and the real father of ISPS – participated in and contributed papers to the Symposia in: Zurich (1959), Basel (1964), Turku (1971), Oslo (1975), Lausanne (1978), Heidelberg (1981), New Haven (1984), Turin (1988), and Stockholm (1991). (For a history of the ISPS see Alanen, Silver, & González de Chávez, Citation2006). At the 1994 Washington DC Symposium, Maurizio Peciccia presented the paper he had written with him on the splitting between separate and symbiotic states of the self in people diagnosed with “schizophrenia” (Peciccia & Benedetti, Citation1996). It was at this Symposium that the three authors of this obituary first met.
Benedetti moved psychoanalysis with psychotic persons away from a primary emphasis on transmission of cognitive insight, to the transmission of therapeutic transforming images, of transitional subjects, of mirror phenomena, of patient–therapist symmetries, of therapeutic dreams, and of progressive psychopathology.
However, Benedetti’s main lesson goes beyond the technical aspects of his contribution and centers around his deep conviction of the possibility of reaching out to any suffering human being, given our common humanity. Any form of psychic suffering centers around a problem of meaning and communication (and not, primarily, of neurotransmitters), and around helping people who are suffering to find the key to their lives – as we ourselves must keep trying to find our own. This task is made a little harder with the passing of a guiding light such as Gaetano Benedetti. He will be missed and remembered. His ideas and deep humanity will remain with us.
Marco Conci (Munich)Brian Koehler (New York)
Maurizio Peciccia (Perugia)
[email protected]
References
- Alanen, Y., Silver, A.-L., & González de Chávez, M. (2006). Fifty years of humanistic treatment of psychosis, 1956–2006. Madrid: Paradox.
- Benedetti, G. (1983). Todeslandschaften der Seele (Landscapes of death of the soul). Göttingen: Vandenhöck und Ruprecht.
- Benedetti, G. (1994). Mein Weg zur Psychoanalyse und zur Psychiatrie (My way to psychoanalysis and to psychiatry). In L. Hermanns (Ed.), Die Psychoanalyse in Selbstdarstellungen. Band 2 (Psychoanalysis in self-portraits. Volume 2). Tübingen: Diskord.
- Bleuler, M. (1987). Foreword. In G. Benedetti (Ed.), Psychotherapy of schizophrenia. New York, NY: New York University Press.
- Peciccia, M., & Benedetti, G. (1996). The splitting between the separate and the symbiotic states of the self in the psychodynamic of schizophrenia. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 5, 23–38.