Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996
10.4081/rp.2022.706
Che cosa vuol dire recepire e promuovere in Italia l’importante opera di uno psicoanalista straniero? L’autore se ne occupa per quanto riguarda S.A. Mitchell (1946-2000), della cui opera fu il primo cultore italiano negli anni 1988-1996, riuscendo a contribuire a promuoverne una recezione superiore a quella di qualsiasi altro paese europeo.
application/pdf
2037-7851
706
s1
it
Marco Conci
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Ricerca Psicoanalitica
storia della psicoanalisi.
Stephen Mitchell in Italia, 1988-1996
https://www.pagepress.org/socialsciences/rp
33
Scritti
2022-12-30
2022-07-05
2023-01-31
2023-01-31
Ricerca Psicoanal
Marco Conci
2022/12/30
10.4081/rp.2022.706
Medico, psichiatra, psicoanalista e membro dell’IFPS e dell’IPA; psicoanalista a Monaco di Baviera, analista didatta e supervisore della Akademie für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie e membro ordinario della Società Psicoanalitica Tedesca (DPG); membro ordinario della Società Psicoanalitica Italiana
2037-7851
s1
storia della psicoanalisi.
it
Sullivan, H. S. (1962). Schizophrenia as a human process. New York: Norton. Italian edition, 1993.
Stephen Mitchell in Italia, 1988-1996
https://www.pagepress.org/socialsciences/rp/article/download/706/730
33
                                     Ricerca Psicoanalitica | pISSN 1827-4625 | Year XXXIII, s1, 2022
                                                                             doi:10.4081/rp.2022.706


                                                                                         WRITINGS



Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996

Marco Conci*




ABSTRACT. – What does it mean to receive and promote in Italy the important work of a foreign




                                                               ly
psychoanalyst? The author deals with this issue with regard to S.A. Mitchell (1946-2000), having
he devoted himself to the promotion of his work in Italy in the years 1988-1996, with the result




                                                             on
of its greater reception in Italy than in any other European country.


                                                 e
Key words: H.S Sullivan; S.A. Mitchell; relational psychoanalysis; history of psychoanalysis.
                                              us
                                           al
                                       ci


Introduction
                                  er



    I am extremely grateful to Laura Corbelli and Paolo Migone for inviting
                             m




me to tell the story of the reception of Stephen Mitchell’s work (1946-2000)
                     om




in Italy, in terms of the pioneering role I played in it from 1988 to 1996.
    I have dealt with this issue in the chapter ‘S.A. Mitchell (1946-2000) in
                 -c




Italy’ in my book, Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the multiple voices
          on




of international psychoanalysis, published in 2019 in New York by
International Psychoanalytic Books, the publishing house founded by
      N




Arnold Richards, editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association in the 1990s. In my book, I tried to show how the thinking of
the authors mentioned in the title can only be understood by relating it to
their biography, their personal issues, the context in which they worked, the
colleagues with whom they came into contact, and the scientific debate of
that time. In particular, I also believe that the authors quoted were all excel-
lent clinicians and that, on this basis, they could easily understand each
other when discussing their patients. Not to mention the need to create, in
this way, a ‘comparative psychoanalysis’ based on the way our theories


     *Medical Doctor, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and member of IFPS and IPA;
psychoanalyst in Munich, training analyst and supervisor at the Akademie für Psychoanalyse
und Psychotherapie (DGPT) and full member of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG);
full member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. E-mail: marcoconci@aol.com
66                                      Marco Conci



have developed from the complex interaction described above between
authors, contexts and related scientific exchanges, rather than a ‘compara-
tive psychoanalysis’ based only on the comparison between theories
divorced from the variables mentioned above. As for the chapter in question
specifically, in writing it I was guided by the double need to account for the
personal relationship I had had with Stephen Mitchell in the reception of his
work in Italy, and how over the years I had been rethinking and re-evaluat-
ing his important contribution.
    Indeed, it was in Ricerca Psicoanalitica that a fine review of my 2019
book appeared in 2021, by Alessandro Musetti of the University of Parma,
to whom I am grateful for the seriousness with which he approached my
work and the generosity with which he spoke about it. These are his con-
cluding remarks:




                                                                       ly
                                                                 on
     ‘Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the Multiple Voices of International
     Psychoanalysis’ is recommended reading for anyone interested in psychoanaly-

                                                      e
     sis - in particular, I believe, for students and post-graduate students of psychol-
                                                   us
     ogy and psychotherapy, and candidates in psychoanalytic training - because it
     allows one to get in touch with a living psychoanalysis. A psychoanalysis that
     has a history, and therefore a development, that does not aim at purity and omni-
                                                al

     science, but at extending the possibility of being alive in one’s own humanity:
                                            ci


     this is the engine driving the bookish transposition of the psychoanalytic corpus
                                       er



     that often alienates even before it is known. While awaiting the Italian edition,
     which I hope will appear soon, I recommend reading the English version pub-
                                  m




     lished by International Psychoanalytic Books’ (Musetti, 2021, 530).
                          om




   On the strength of this positive feedback, I have gladly accepted the
                      -c




opportunity offered by Ricerca Psicoanalitica to tell ‘my story’ to Italian
readers too.
               on
           N




Florence, April 1988

   I met Mitchell in Florence on Saturday 8 April 1988 during the clinical
seminar he held there on the invitation of the Institute of Analytical
Psychotherapy, directed by Virginia Giliberti Tincolini, whose students at
the time were colleagues of mine who later became friends, such as Carlo
Bonomi, Anna Maria Loiacono and Roberto Cutajar. I arrived at the semi-
nar at the last moment, as there was a conference at the Family Therapy
Institute in Florence that weekend which I decided to forgo once I heard
about the meeting with Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell. In Florence I
had graduated in Medicine in the autumn of 1981, I had a good information
network and knew the city well - not an easy city from various points of
view, but very fascinating
   For me, ‘Greenberg and Mitchell’ meant the important encounter I had
                             Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996                           67



already had with their book, Object relations in psychoanalytic theory.
Published in the United States in 1983, the book was promptly published in
Italian by Il Mulino in Bologna in 1986, having been recommended by two
colleagues psychoanalysts teaching at the University of Padua - Giuseppe
Fava and Cristina Esposito. It quickly became a classic and represented, at
that time, not only the first important work on ‘comparative psychoanaly-
sis’, but also the first book which led to the unravelling of a ‘relational
thread’ in the history of psychoanalysis as a whole. Written in a clear, stim-
ulating style, the authors - two young psychologists and psychoanalysts
from the W.A. White Institute in New York - did not hesitate to connect the
theories they dealt with and the lives of their authors and their contexts. Last
but not least, because of Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell’s ‘first-hand’
knowledge of the subject matter, the reader could tell that the book had been




                                                                    ly
written in New York, at that time an important capital of psychoanalysis - a




                                                           on
city I knew well, having lived there as a teenager, and to which I felt deeply
attached.

                                                e
    For those who do not know this book, which the publishing house in
                                             us
Bologna failed to reprint for several years (and which I now see, thanks to
the Internet, is once again available), I can say that the problem the authors
                                          al

started with was one which they experienced as a difficulty in psychoanal-
                                      ci


ysis, the divergence between a Freudian theory anchored in a metapsychol-
                                 er



ogy based on the libidinal economy of the individual patient, and, on the
                            m




other hand, a clinical activity which in the post-Freudian era had become
increasingly attentive to the analytical process developing in the relation-
                    om




ship between two people. The book is made up of four parts: the first, devot-
ed to Freud and Sullivan; the second, to Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott
               -c




and Guntrip; the third, to Hartmann, Mahler, Jacobson and Kernberg; and
         on




the fourth, to Kohut and Sandler, whom the authors value for their ‘mixed
model’, drive and relational at the same time. One should bear in mind,
     N




however, that the ‘epistemological thread’ of their approach lies in what the
authors claim to be the logical incompatibility between the two models,
drive and relational, which leads them to see the future of psychoanalysis
not in a model like Sandler’s (which, in my opinion, has ended up as the
prevailing one) but in a persisting opposition of the two models, with the
possibility that in future one or the other will prevail, with a continuous
exchange and mutual enrichment. But here is what they wrote almost forty
years ago:

     ‘It is difficult to predict the future directions of a discipline as complex as psy-
     choanalysis. It may be that the drive model will prove convincing and elastic
     enough to incorporate within its framework the data and concepts produced by
     the study of object relations. In this case, the relational models will disappear,
     having fulfilled the positive function of stimulating and extending the original
     approach. On the other hand, relational models could prove increasingly con-
68                                      Marco Conci



      vincing, they could expand and combine with each other, creating an attractive
      and comprehensive framework for theory and technique. If this were to happen,
      drive theory would gradually lose its followers and become an important and
      elegant antique item, no longer in use’ (Greenberg and Mitchel, 1986, p.401;
      translation from the Italian).

     And immediately afterwards:
      ‘We suspect, however, that neither of these two eventualities will materialise.
      The paradox of man’s dual nature - being highly individual and at the same time
      social - goes too deep and is too connected to our civilisation for us to choose
      one direction or the other. It seems more likely that both models, the drive and
      the relational, will continue to be viable, passing through continuous revisions
      and transformations, and the fertile exchange between these two ways of view-
      ing the human experience will generate creative dialogue. We hope that our




                                                                      ly
      work will contribute to making the dialogue meaningful’ (ibid., pp.402-403;




                                                               on
      translation from the Italian).

    I have always been convinced that Greenberg’s and Mitchell’s contribu-
                                                     e
tion to this dialogue was fundamental and have continued to use it and to rec-
                                                  us
ommend its study in my teachings, on the history of psychotherapy and psy-
choanalysis, at various Italian schools since the second half of the 1990s, even
                                               al

though I no longer agree with the emphasis on the epistemological premise
                                            ci


mentioned above. But I will return to this later. For instance, the book con-
                                       er



tains an unsurpassed chapter - written by Mitchell - on H.S. Sullivan (1892-
                                  m




1949), Erich Fromm (1900-1980) and interpersonal psychoanalysis.
                           om




    But let’s go back to April 1988. Mitchell and Greenberg were involved
in two parallel groups, and by sheer chance I was in the group led by the
former of the two. I soon realised that the consecutive translation being car-
                      -c




ried out was not working well and offered to translate Mitchell’s speech to
                on




the group myself. After a few minutes, Mitchell was relieved to see that the
            N




group had started to laugh at his jokes, which he had included - as he told
me later - in order to check whether the translation was working effectively.
So it was that I spent the rest of the time translating Mitchell consecutively,
which not only brought us very close, but also earned me the gratitude of
the board of the Institute of Analytical Psychotherapy, who - by inviting me
to dinner - actually allowed me to get to know him.
    In the course of the evening, I told him that - thanks to a scholarship in
1972 from the American Field Service (AFS) - I was able to spend a year in
a New York suburb, living with a family of Jewish origin, and I graduated
from the local high school. I mentioned that I was also very interested in
Sullivan’s work and I was giving a seminar on his interpersonal theory at
the Department of Philosophy at the University of Venice - as an Assistant
Professor of Dynamic Psychology, a course taught at the time by Lucio
Pinkus. And so it was that ‘Steven’, as I now began to call him, told me
about his personal passion for Sullivan, and that he himself had written the
                                Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996                              69



above-mentioned chapter, and gave me a whole series of insights to help
further my understanding of his work.1
   In fact, in my recollection he was so impressed by this sudden unexpected
possibility of sharing, that I myself was motivated to write a book on Sullivan.
A book which would introduce colleagues - both Italian and foreign - to


     1    I have reported these details - personal and professional - to clarify to the reader my
transference on the figure of Mitchell - indeed, a kind of ‘love at first sight’, undoubtedly
deserving of analytical investigation. Without doing so, it would be more difficult to under-
stand my whole (neurotic, that is, irrational, or at least exaggerated) commitment of many
years to the promotion of his work in Italy. As for Mitchell himself, his interest undoubtedly
helped him to positively correspond to my commitment to his figure.




                                                                       ly
     Now, developing this line of research, I can identify as a starting point of my commit-
ment all the despair I was then experiencing in connection with my professional choice -




                                                               on
which I originally made with a naivety similar to that with which Freud himself speaks of it
in his ‘Autobiography’ of 1924. I refer to his motivation - which he himself adduced and for-

                                                   e
mulated - to become a doctor in order to participate in the shared goal of a scientific com-
                                                us
munity wholly devoted to scientific research - and within which the merit of each researcher
would be dispassionately acknowledged. The case of Freud comes to mind not only because
it is well known to all, but also because I have dealt at length with the unconscious reasons
                                             al

for his choice to study medicine, on several occasions (see Conci, 1992b, 1996b and 2016b),
                                         ci


as a historian of psychoanalysis.
                                    er



     It actually took me many years to realise that, even in our field, the prevailing aspect is
business. With a few exceptions, everyone tries to sell his psychoanalysis - or, to take a
                               m




recent example, his ‘field theory’. I also dealt with this aspect - albeit implicitly - in an article
a few years ago (see Conci, 2016a).
                      om




     The fact remains that my ability to turn my encounter with Mitchell into ‘good business’
was actually so limited as to deserve this kind of self-analytical investigation. In short, while
                  -c




it never occurred to me to found a ‘Mitchell Institute’, I hoped in my heart that the expertise
I had accumulated in this field might find more space within, for example, the Milanese
           on




group in which I had trained - but it did not. Perhaps it was because I was waiting to be invit-
ed to do so without putting myself forward with greater determination?
       N




     At the same time, it is also true that the familiarity I acquired in this way with the ‘new
American psychoanalysis’ allowed me - together with my familiarity with German-speaking
psychoanalysis - to pursue a ‘nice career’ within the IFPS (see above) and its journal, the
International Forum of Psychoanalysis. Indeed, it is an activity I still enjoy to this day - but
even this does not exempt me from trying to understand the neurotic reasons behind my then
exaggerated commitment to Mitchell and his work. A commitment that arose from a passion
worthy of investigation.
     Perhaps there are might be some colleagues who believe that I was right to do all that
work, and that the Italian analytical community also benefited greatly from it - but I have yet
to hear anyone say so.
     Having said this, to go even deeper would be to point out to the reader that my father
was actually a ‘very good businessman’ - and that this conflict still gives me pause. Be that
as it may, this is also the explanation for the ‘hypomanic tone’ of my speech and all the
details I recount - to protect myself from getting in touch with the sense of despair that pre-
ceded the flash of lightning that I experienced upon meeting Mitchell.
     Last but not the least, by this I also mean that for me psychoanalysis is firstly something
personal (i.e. interpersonal), and only secondly the work we do with our patients - a fasci-
nating line of disciplinary research.
70                                  Marco Conci



Sullivan’s life, the context of his work, and his overall oeuvre. And that was
how Sullivan revisited – Life and work. Harry Stack Sullivan’s relevance
forc contemporary psychiatry, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (2000)
was born, which is to say that I spent the next twelve years working on this
project. I believe my book is worth reading, and this has been confirmed by
its subsequent translations into German (2005), English (2010 and 2012)
and Spanish (2012). Moreover, thanks to his enthusiasm for psychoanalysis
and his passion for writing, Mitchell inspired a whole generation of col-
leagues during his lifetime, all of whom were very grateful to him.
    But back to that evening, and another reason for gratitude. I don’t recall
Steven ever asking me - either that evening or ever - what point I had
reached in my analytic training and where I was doing it. In fact, Pier
Francesco Galli, whom I met for the first time in Zurich, at the International




                                                              ly
Psychoanalytic Liaison conference in May 1986, took the same approach




                                                         on
with me. That is to say, they were both relieved - if I may say so - by the
fact that I was able to understand what they were saying and that I was, in

                                                 e
some way, able to talk to them. I say this also because after specialising in
                                              us
psychiatry in July 1986 at the Catholic University in Rome, I was then
working as a psychiatrist for the SSN (National Health Service) in the
                                           al

province of Trento, my hometown, where I was also undergoing my own
                                       ci


analysis. I would begin analytic training a few months later, in September
                                   er



1988, at the Scuola di Psicoterapia Psicoanalitica (SPP) in Milan - founded
                               m




a decade earlier by a group of students of Gaetano Benedetti (1920-2013)
and Johannes Cremerius (1918-2002).
                        om




    Pier Franceso Galli had actually initiated that contact from the mid-
1960s onwards, but that group of colleagues (who included Guido Medri
                    -c




and Ciro Elia, Lilia d’Alfonso and Teresa Corsi) should be credited with
               on




having carried out such collaborative work leading to professional growth
with great commitment - culminating in 1989 in the admission of the
           N




Associazione di Studi Psicoanalitici (ASP) to the International Federation
of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS). Incidentally, this is a story I wrote for
the readers of the International Forum of Psychoanalysis on the occasion of
the 50th anniversary of the IFPS, celebrated in Mexico City in 2012 (see
Conci, 2014a).
    After all these years, I would also like to point out that it is likely that by
treating me as they did, Mitchell and Galli intended to show me, or rather
to confirm, that the most important gift we can bring to our analytical work
is our personal baggage, baggage that our course of studies and our training
- our personal or didactic analysis and our analytical training - can greatly
improve but will not change in its basic features. And by this I mean our
personality, our family of origin and our personal history.
    From this point of view, it took me many years to realise what an impor-
tant role was played, in my aforementioned first meeting with Steven
                         Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996                71



Mitchell, by sharing with him the deep conviction - which I already had at
that time - that our psychological problems can only be understood in the
context of our most important interpersonal relationships. Ever since I was a
child, my biggest problem had been my father, namely, how to find a way to
get along with both my mother and my father, while at the same time man-
aging to find my own way in life - that is, to elaborate the oedipal phase. I
was the eldest of three sons, and particularly close to my mother, who
involved me in her conflicts with her husband. I found myself having to take
care of my family in a way similar to what Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1889-
1958) talks about in her memoirs - collected in 1989 by Anne-Louise Silver
- in which she writes that she had been a psychiatrist since she was a child!
It was precisely along these lines that I myself must have developed - as has
also been the case for many colleagues - the desire, or rather the vocation, to




                                                                ly
become a doctor, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst as a child. To go back to my




                                                       on
father, the additional problem was the fact that he was a skilful and success-
ful construction engineer with his own company, and his wish to have me

                                            e
working with him was so great that he never approved of my decision to
                                         us
become a doctor. In short, based on my own experience, I believe that the
most important protective factor for our mental health is how soon we are
                                      al

able to go beyond the commandment to obey our father and mother, and to
                                 ci


trust ourselves rather than them, in finding our own way in life. Well, I
                            er



already knew all this before I started my personal analysis (in September
                        m




1983), although it did help me to ‘really find my own voice’.
    By this I also mean that when - as a medical student in Florence in the
                  om




mid-1970s - I read Sullivan’s Interpersonal theory of psychiatry following
a personal interest, I discovered - mutatis mutandis - that Sullivan wrote in
              -c




the equally ‘crude, but true’ manner which I have used in the previous para-
         on




graph. Anyone who knows him a little knows that Sullivan was of the opin-
ion that if we have a clear idea of how our interpersonal relationships work,
     N




what we - without realising it - put into them, what we - without realising it
- expect from them, and what we get out of them, we can rightfully aspire
to mental health - which for Sullivan was also the essential prerequisite for
a satisfying life. And, by this, I also mean that, in my personal and profes-
sional experience, it is not only the personal baggage we bring to our work
that is crucial, but also our curiosity and our ability to work in a self-learn-
ing manner, as I did as a medical student. It is well known that many col-
leagues unfortunately limit themselves to the knowledge of authors and the-
ories handed down to them by their training institution, without exploring
on their own the contribution of many other authors who are equally useful
to our work. I could not otherwise explain the non-existent role that
Sullivan’s work and legacy still play in the analytical training of many
International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) societies, including the
Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI).
72                                     Marco Conci



   Well, many years after that first meeting with Mitchell described above,
I do believe that all the things I have just tried to express played an impor-
tant part in creating the common wavelength I have described, as well as its
positive outcome, a positive outcome that marked my subsequent life for
many years to come. At the same time, I also think that our meeting in April
1988 represented for me an important confirmation of my choice to under-
take the analytical training at the aforementioned SPP in Milan, since it was
Gaetano Benedetti who introduced Sullivan’s work in Italy in the early
1960s. I am referring to the brilliant Preface written by Benedetti in 1961 to
the Italian edition of Sullivan’s Conceptions of modern psychiatry, La mod-
erna concezione della psichiatria, from which the following passage
comes, which I am always pleased to quote:




                                                                     ly
     ‘Sullivan’s ability to dissect the dynamics of mental states has rarely been




                                                              on
     achieved by other researchers; in this passage, the clinician Sullivan surpasses
     the theoretically inclined Freud, who studied a relatively small number of men-
     tal patients. We are also impressed by the sense of authentic veracity that

                                                    e
     emanates from Sullivan’s clinical observations, and by how alien he is to any
                                                 us
     purely doctrinal construct. Sullivan makes us experience before our eyes what
     in other psychiatric systems sometimes appears as a preparation of psychic
                                              al

     anatomy. Freud himself seems caught up in a rigid and abstract mechanism, in
                                           ci


     comparison with Sullivan’s dynamic phenomenology’ (Benedetti, 1961, p.
     XVIII).
                                      er
                                 m




    Or, to put it differently, just as Mitchell with his Florentine seminar
created a ‘first-hand’ contact with interpersonal psychoanalysis, so I
                          om




expected that authoritative Central European psychoanalysts like
Benedetti and Cremerius would permit me, through their training and
                     -c




work in Switzerland and Germany, respectively, to come into contact with
               on




the cultural and linguistic roots of psychoanalysis, i.e., to ‘drink directly
from the source’. As a medical student and as a psychiatry resident in
           N




Florence and in Rome, my contacts with the psychoanalysts of the SPI
revealed that none of them seemed to know German - an important ingre-
dient in Freud’s work. I grew up in Trento, where I was exposed to the
German language and culture since childhood and came to experience it
as a positive resource, which encouraged me to attend my first year of
medical school at the University of Innsbruck. And, in fact, my decision
to follow the work of Benedetti and Cremerius proved so rewarding that
since the spring of 1999 - although I never closed the practice I opened in
Trento in October 1988 - I have been working in Munich as a psychoana-
lyst within the framework of their unique Kassensystem, that is, their
nationwide system of financial coverage of psychoanalytic psychothera-
py. Since then – in my role of Italian Kassenpsychoanalytiker - I have
worked mainly with the many Italians living in that city, so far and yet so
close to Italy.
                         Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996                 73



     In fact, a comparable sensitivity and orientation allowed Pier Francesco
Galli and Gaetano Benedetti to give life to the prestigious ‘Library of
Psychiatry and Clinical Psychology’ for the publisher Feltrinelli, with the
aim of making up for the great delay that the Fascist Regime and the ide-
alistic orientation of the philosophers Croce and Gentile had caused in the
reception of a whole series of fundamental texts in our field. These includ-
ed an author like Sullivan. The above-mentioned La moderna concezione
della psichiatria was the first volume in the series, quickly followed by:
Teoria interpersonale della psichiatria (1962), Studi clinici (1965), and Il
colloquio psichiatrico (1967). Incidentally, Galli himself wrote a very
good and coincise Preface to Sullivan’s second book (Galli, 1962) - and in
1991 a ‘Nota introduttiva alla nona edizione’ of Il colloquio psichiatrico
(Galli, 1991). It is a fact that the colleagues at the above-mentioned




                                                                ly
Florentine institute would not have been able to invite Greenberg and




                                                       on
Mitchell or to understand them if they had not first read Sullivan’s work
published by Feltrinelli. Not to mention the fact that it is still impossible to

                                            e
understand Mitchell - or Bromberg - without knowing Sullivan’s work
                                         us
well. To know only Mitchell or Bromberg is like knowing Bion, but not
Klein, or even Freud.
                                      al

     Incidentally, my work in promoting Sullivan’s work - before Mitchell’s
                                 ci


- culminated in the publication of his 1962 anthology Schizophrenia as a
                             er



human process as No. 84 in Feltrinelli’s Library in March 1993, to which
                         m




I added my own Preface, where I argued that it was in fact Sullivan’s first
book that we should all read if we want to understand him fully. As for the
                  om




overall history of the reception of Sullivan’s work in Italy, I refer the reader
to my ‘Introduction to the new Italian edition’ of Sullivan’s The psychiatric
              -c




interview, written for the new edition promoted by the publisher Giovanni
         on




Fioriti in 2017 - forty years after its first Italian publication. Of course, in
it I also argue that it is a classic not to be missed, and in any case of a supe-
     N




rior quality to the many books that have been published in recent years on
the subject of the first interview.
     I have written all this because I believe that everything I have written
so far pertains to and shines a light on my first meeting with Stephen
Mitchell - I myself have now not only rewritten in Italian what the reader
can find in my 2019 book, but I also expressed considerations that are new
to me as well. To these I would add the following: I had begun to take an
interest in Sullivan seeing in him a social psychiatrist capable - unlike our
‘new Italian psychiatry’ - to deal with the social aspects of our work with-
out putting the clinical and therapeutic dimensions of the individual patient
in brackets, and in Gaetano Benedetti I saw a psychiatrist who knew how
to be, like Sullivan himself, a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoan-
alyst at the same time - at a time when the culture of the Società
Psicoanalitica Italiana (SPI), the Italian IPA group, was, if I am not mistak-
74                                Marco Conci



en, going in the opposite direction. Moreover, Mitchell, Benedetti and
Cremerius also agreed on - as I discovered in the years of my analytical
training - the concept of continuity between psychotherapy and psycho-
analysis. Incidentally, I published an article on these issues in 2014 entitled
‘Le radici della svolta relazionale in psicoanalisi. Da Sullivan a Mitchell
attraverso l’ASP, ossia il punto di vista di Benedetti e Cremerius’.
    However, I do not wish to end this first paragraph without mentioning
Paolo Migone. Paolo was not only the colleague to whom in those months
of 1988 I turned to for advice on whether or not to resign from the National
Health Service and start to work in private practice, putting my analytic
training at the centre of it, which he encouraged me to do. It is also thanks
to Paolo Migone that I became acquainted with Merton Gill’s (1914-1994)
Theory and technique of transference analysis, the book in which Gill




                                                           ly
(1982) enhances his sympathy for Sullivan’s point of view by focusing on




                                                      on
the specific contribution we as analysts make to the structuring of a certain
type of transference by the patient. Incidentally, on this issue I gladly refer

                                               e
to Migone’s 1991 article ‘The difference between psychoanalysis and psy-
                                            us
chotherapy: a historical overview of the debate and Merton N. Gill’s recent
position’ - later included as Chapter 4 in his book Terapia psicoanalitica
                                         al

(Migone, 1995). Well, transference no longer depends, as it did in Freud,
                                     ci


only on the patient’s past, but also on the kind of relationship we allow him
                                 er



to develop with us. By this I also mean that, in my personal analysis - then
                             m




in progress - I felt that this dimension was not sufficiently considered. That
is also why I turned to Sullivan’s interpersonal tradition and the manner in
                       om




which Mitchell was carrying it forward.
    Not to speak of the kind of listening I was receiving, a listening tuned
                   -c




more to Ego Psychology, to which of my psychic agencies was most
              on




active at that moment - whether Ego, Id or Super-Ego - than to a more
active participation in the concrete detail of what I was narrating. My ana-
           N




lyst listened to me carefully, but... did she really see me? Today we know
how important it is not only to listen to patients, but also to see them move
in the world - not to mention the need to mirror them so that they can get
in touch with themselves. Well, these are all issues introduced into psy-
choanalysis by Sullivan, who was also the first to lament and criticise the
limits of free association divorced from relationship. If we all have not
only conflicts but also deficits, we will never reach these deficits through
our free association alone since they can only be explored and illuminated
if they are shown to us in the context of a sufficiently close relationship
in which we feel adequately supported. In other words, Sullivan would
say, the problem is not only repression, but also a simple failure to per-
ceive the world around us, a phenomenon he calls ‘selective inattention’.
And free association alone cannot overcome it, only an adequate analyti-
cal relationship.
                          Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996                 75



From Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. An integration (1988)
to its Italian edition: Gli orientamenti relazionali in psicoanalisi.
Per un modello integrato
    In spite of all the details I have already given of my first meeting with
Mitchell and Greenberg, there are still important aspects to be explained. I
remember, for instance, how surprised and delighted they were by the unex-
pected invitation from Italy and by receiving such a warm welcome, not least
because they had never been celebrated for their 1983 book at home, at the
W.A. White Institute. And yet, the book had the great merit of bringing Sullivan
and Fromm into the psychoanalytic mainstream, that is, of restoring to inter-
personal psychoanalysis the important role it deserved within the contempo-
rary analytic debate - later also being considered by many as the book that




                                                                 ly
decreed the birth of relational psychoanalysis. It is true, however, that when the
W.A. White Institute’s application - upheld by the director Clara Thompson




                                                        on
(1893-1958) - to join the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and
the IPA was definitively rejected in the mid-1950s, a situation had arisen in
                                             e
New York in which the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the W.A. White
                                          us
Institute no longer had any relationship with each other. Well, if the publication
of Object relations in psychoanalytic theory was also intended to offer a way
                                       al

out of this stalemate in the scientific and professional dialogue, the ‘old guard’
                                  ci


of their colleagues had not felt or had long since given up on this need. Among
                             er



them, for example, was the then director Earl Witenberg (1917-2002), director
                         m




from 1963 to 1992, whom I got to know at a subsequent conference organised
by the Florentine colleagues in Montecatini Terme, in October 1988, as well
                  om




as on other occasions in the following years - and to whom I am still grateful
for having introduced me to his neo-Sullivanian point of view.
              -c




    Not to mention the fact that Greenberg and Mitchell were brilliant young
         on




psychologists who had done their training at White not only because of their
adherence to the politically progressive point of view that had always charac-
     N




terised the institute, but also because - contrary to Freud’s own wishes - the
APsaA excluded non-MDs from analytic training, and this would continue
until the early 1990s. As Paolo Migone (1987) has recounted in full detail, this
was an epoch-making turning point that the APsaA was obliged to introduce
following a class action by American psychologists who appealed to the
Supreme Court. Well, this is another essential contextual fact in order to under-
stand the political motivations that may have led Stephen Mitchell to formulate
and develop Relational Psychoanalysis, as he began to do in his book pub-
lished in 1988, Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. An integration.
Whereas his initial motivation for ‘psychoanalytic politics’ had been to end the
isolation of his institute and create a series of conceptual bridges between
Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and the analytic mainstream, his second was to
give his fellow psychologists a new theory - Relational Psychoanalysis - with
which to oppose on an equal footing the medically trained analysts of the
APsaA, trained in the tradition of North American Ego Psychology.
76                                      Marco Conci



    As for Jay Greenberg, who was four years older than Mitchell, I can at
this point say that he too shared these aims, although he was at that time
much closer to the analytic mainstream than Mitchell. He contributed the
chapter on the Ego Psychology to the 1983 book, and in 1991 he published
his only book, Oedipus and beyond. A clinical theory, in which he reinstat-
ed the drive dimension in psychoanalytic theory, as I reported in my review
of the book for the journal Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane (see Conci, 1994).
    Referring now to the latter, I can state the following: as the culmination
of a sophisticated and complex theoretical journey, Greenberg proposed a
new drive theory of his own since he believed for a psychoanalytic theory
of personality without any concept of drive to be unfounded. As a result,
he ended up proposing the following two drives: the drive for safety, which
moves us towards objects, and the drive for effectance, which moves us




                                                                        ly
away from objects. In this way, Greenberg also intended to safeguard




                                                                 on
the primary status of conflict, in its pre-experiential rather than interper-
sonal nature.

                                                       e
    By going back to Freud’s work in the 1890s’ and his Studies on hysteria
                                                    us
and revisiting it in the light of Joseph Sandler’s (1927-1998) concept of the
‘representational world’, the author also introduced the interesting new con-
                                                 al

cept of re-representation, according to which we represent the same event
                                            ci


differently in keeping with our personal evolution. In this way the therapeu-
                                       er



tic action of psychoanalysis moves in the direction of creating conditions of
safety that allow the patient to re-appropriate the repressed experience and
                                   m




expand his representational and therefore behavioural repertoire. This also
                           om




allows Greenberg to revisit the concept of ‘analytic neutrality’, which he
redefined in the sense of the use that the analyst must make of himself in
                      -c




order to maximise both the security and the risk of the analytic work: if the
                on




analyst cannot be experienced as a ‘new object’, the analysis can never
begin; if he cannot be experienced as an ‘old object’, it will never end.
           N




    This was my conclusion to my review of the book:

     ‘Shuffling the cards in the field of analytical theory and technique is a game
     Greenberg plays very well and to the great benefit of the reader. But what is the
     outcome? In the preface he writes that he does not intend ‘to combine the mod-
     els (drive and relational) but try to extract from each model the one that best fits
     my understanding of the patients’ (p. VIII), while in his response to Irwin
     Hirsch’s review for Psychoanalytic Books No. 2/1992, he states ‘that he is of the
     conviction that new wine in old barrels is what psychoanalysis needs’ (p. 192).
     What happened to the epistemological rigour that characterised the handbook he
     wrote with Mitchell in 1983? And furthermore, why does the author in this book
     not take an explicit stance towards his earlier work, thus helping us to better
     understand its evolution? In his reply to Hirsch we can also read the following:
     because of the paradox that makes our life at the same time inexorably social
     and eminently private, ‘I hope that the debate between analysts of the drive and
     relational models will never be resolved’ (ibid.). Is this a step backwards? Is this
     a step forward?’ (Conci, 1994, p. 133).
                          Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996                 77



    Well, today I would argue that Greenberg did well to maintain at that time,
as well as in his later career, the aforementioned tension between the drive
and relational models, a tension that was lost in Mitchell’s 1988 book, but the
loss of which also led, in my view, to Freud’s work as a whole being increas-
ingly overshadowed by the kind of evolution that Relational Psychoanalysis
has had since Mitchell’s untimely death. I was able to have a chat with Jay
Greenberg in July 2019 (at the IPA Congress in London), and he reminded me
that he had not at that time followed Mitchell in setting up the journal
Psychoanalytic Dialogues (1991), for fear that such an initiative would cause
the fragmentation of our discipline to escalate. In 2010 he became the editor
of the prestigious journal Psychoanalyic Quarterly, and has carried out for ten
years a remarkable and important renewal of the psychoanalytic mainstream,
introducing into it the dialogical instance he had originally developed with




                                                                 ly
Mitchell as he had stated in his first Editorial in 2011: ‘My hope is to use these




                                                        on
pages to reflect and encourage the creative expansion of psychoanalytic ideas
as they emerge within different analytic cultures, and also related disciplines

                                             e
that share our interest in studying human experience in depth’ (p. 2).
                                          us
    On the other hand, an eloquent example of how post-Mitchellian
Relational Psychoanalysis has lost sight of Freud, i.e. claims to represent a
                                       al

kind of ‘new beginning’ of psychoanalysis itself, can be represented by
                                  ci


Steven Kuchuk’s recent book The relational revolution in psychoanalysis and
                             er



psychotherapy, a book the author dedicated to Lew Aron, who passed away
                         m




in 2019 at the age of 67. Those who read it may miss the fact that Freud not
only created our profession, but also provided it with the solid clinical foun-
                  om




dations on which our work still rests today. I refer, for example, to his concept
of how the patient’s unconscious and the analyst’s unconscious can come into
              -c




direct contact with each other, as we learn from his famous 1912 article
         on




‘Recommendations to the physician practicing psychoanalysis’. Not to men-
tion the concept of ‘transference’, around which all our work still revolves,
     N




regardless of our theoretical orientation. That Freud’s metapsychology, with
particular regard to his drive system, should be properly revisited and criti-
cised is another matter, but this - in my view - should not obscure the impor-
tant legacy Freud left us on the clinical level.
    But I have now come to the great turning point imprinted on my relation-
ship with Mitchell by his book published in 1988. At that time we were keep-
ing in touch through letters, and Mitchell informed me of the publication of
an important book, Relational Concepts In Psychoanalysis. An integration. I
decided to spend part of the Christmas holidays that year in New York, buy
his book, read it and discuss it with him. That is when he explained to me that
the Relational Psychoanalysis he formulated in his book, which was taken to
be a new current or school of psychoanalysis, actually saw the light not at the
W.A. White Institute, but within the Post-Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis
and Psychotherapy at New York University, founded in 1961 by Bernard
78                                       Marco Conci



Kalinkowitz (1915-1992). The Program was already famous for offering a
Freudian, an interpersonal, and a mixed training track, and Mitchell was now
able to create a new relational track, counting on the active collaboration of
Emmanuel Ghent (1925-2003) and Philip Bromberg (1931-2020) - as Lew
Aron (1952-2019) explained in detail in his important book A meeting of
minds: Mutuality in psychoanalysis, translated into Italian by Gianni
Nebbiosi and Susanna Federici. In other words, that was when I began to put
Mitchell definitively in focus, both as the person he was and his professional
evolution, and as regards what he proposed to achieve in the psychoanalytic
field. And this is exactly what I informed my Italian colleagues about in the
review of his book which I published in No. 1/1990 of Psicoterapia e Scienze
Umane, to which I refer the reader regarding what I learned and understood
of Mitchell at the time, as well as the detailed summary of the book I formu-




                                                                         ly
lated in it. As a second-year candidate in the five-year course of studies at SPP




                                                                  on
in Milan, my hands were of course trembling as I wrote a review of a book
whose great importance I sensed, finally formulating the following conclud-

                                                       e
ing considerations, with which I am proud to say I still agree:
                                                    us
     ‘I personally wish Mitchell’s work all the luck it deserves. I also hope that it will
                                                 al

     be translated soon, and that it will be discussed at length. Not since Sullivan
                                             ci


     (1892-1949) has the relational point of view had such a coherent and lucid pre-
     sentation. Clinically, Mitchell’s approach seems to me to echo the extraordinary
                                        er



     sensitivity and delicacy, as well as the incredible conceptual sophistication, with
                                   m




     which Sullivan dealt with patients. At the same time, it is clear how the author’s
     ability to promote such a fruitful dialogue between a whole range of psychoana-
                           om




     lytic schools is not only of enormous didactic value but can also aim to reduce the
     obstacles to the development of psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline. And this
                      -c




     is undoubtedly no small achievement’ (Conci, 1990, p.130).
                on




    In the above chapter of my book, published in 2019, I presented and dis-
            N




cussed the most important reviews Mitchell’s 1988 book had received, report-
ing extensive excerpts of the regular correspondence I had with him at the
time. For a detailed description of the events that followed my 1990 review I
refer the reader to my Introduction to Gli orientatamenti relazionali in psi-
coanalisi. Per un modello integrato - published in Italian in March 1993,
almost thirty years ago, in Simona Rivolta’s translation. Here, instead, I will
simply list them: having sensed the fundamental importance of personal con-
tact with Italian colleagues, to help Mitchell promote awareness of his work
in our country, I organized a series of Italian appointments for Mitchell in
April 1991, and translated the paper he gave in Rome, Milan and Bologna,
which Pier Francesco Galli accepted in No. 3/1991 of his journal. I am refer-
ring to the Italian translation of the article - which later became a classic -
‘Contemporary perspectives on Self: Toward an integration,’ which was pub-
lished in the English original version in the first two issues of the new journal
launched by Mitchell in those very days, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. A
                             Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996                            79



Journal of Relational Perspectives. Indeed, I still remember how excited I
was on receiving from his hands the first issue of this now well-established
journal, containing his famous ‘Editorial philosophy’, whose crucial opening
paragraph I will never tire of quoting:
     ‘There is a great irony at the heart of contemporary psychoanalysis. The skilled
     psychoanalyst as clinician is, perhaps, the most careful and systematic listener, the
     most precise and respectful speaker, the most highly trained and refined commu-
     nicator, that Western culture has produced. A sustained and dedicated effort to dis-
     cover and articulate the personal meanings, the inner logic of the patient’s com-
     munications, is the most fundamental dimension of the craft of psychoanalysis in
     all its variations. Yet, psychoanalysts have enormous difficulty listening and
     speaking meaningfully to each other’ (Mitchell, 1991a, p.1).

    Incidentally, with its editorials, monographic issues, and psychoanalytic




                                                                    ly
dialogues, the journal also played an important innovative role in the field of




                                                           on
psychoanalytic journals, which gradually adopted one or the other of these
solutions. This is true, for example, of the International Forum of
                                                e
Psychoanalysis, the journal of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic
                                             us
Societies (IFPS), which came into being the following year (1992), whose
editorial board I have been a member of since 1994 - having become co-editor
                                          al

in 2007. Thanks to my collaborative relationship with Mitchell, with then-edi-
                                      ci


tor Jan Stensson (Stockholm) we were even able to organize a weekend con-
                                 er



ference in New York in early 1996, a meeting of the two editorial boards with
                            m




presentation of papers and clinical cases. As I wrote at that time (see Conci,
                    om




1996a), we agreed to make our journals primarily a tool for the growth of the
editorial board, the authors, and our readers.
               -c




    But let’s go back to April 1991. Our tour began in Rome, at the Catholic
University, on Saturday, April 13, where Mitchell presented his paper as
         on




part of a Seminar called ‘Matrici relazionli del Sé.: Una prospettiva individ-
     N




uale-famigliare-gruppale’, organized by Massimo Ammaniti, Leonardo
Ancona and Nino Dazzi, with the participation of Sergio Bordi, Corrado
Pontalti and Raffaele Menarini; I presented a paper called ‘La psicoanalisi
interpersonale. Da H.S. Sullivan a S.H. Mitchell’ (see Conci, 1992a). On
Wednesday, April 17, Mitchell presented and discussed in Florence - at the
Instituto di Psicoterapia Analitica- the paper ‘Comparative theories of
aggression.’ And in the afternoon of the following day, we were in Milan,
at the Associazione di Studi Psicoanalitici (ASP) at the invitation of Ciro
Elia and Lilia d’Alfonso, where Mitchell presented his paper
‘Contemporary perspectives on Self,’ and I made the consecutive transla-
tion of the very interesting discussion that followed.
    Having identified the lack of knowledge of the W.A. White Institute’s
interpersonal tradition as a major obstacle to understanding Mitchell’s
thinking, in the months that followed I hastened to translate into Italian
for the journal Quaderni dell’ASP Mitchell’s important contribution ‘The
80                                 Marco Conci



intrapsychic and the interpersonal: Different theories, different domains
or historical artifacts?’ - re-proposed by Francesco De Bei in his transla-
tion in the 2016 volume of Mitchell’s writings which he edited under the
title Teoria e clinica psicoanalitica. Scritti scelti. Incidentally, the book
edited by De Bei contains an important autobiographical writing by
Mitchell - published posthumously in 2004 - entitled ‘My psychoanalytic
journey.’
    Finally, on Saturday, April 20, we were in Bologna at the invitation of Pier
Francesco Galli – the founder and editor of the journal Psicoterapia e Scienze
Umane - and after the presentation and discussion of his paper, Mitchell coor-
dinated the discussion of a clinical case presented by Maria Luisa Mantovani.
Incidentally, this convergence of interests also gave rise to the project, carried
out together with Sergio Dazzi (Parma), of translating a series of classics of




                                                              ly
interpersonal literature and collecting them for publication in the anthology,




                                                        on
La tradizione interpersonale in psichiatria, psicoterapia e pscioanalisi
(1997). Not to mention the renewed interest in this important tradition on the

                                                e
part of Pier Francesco Galli himself, which allowed me to propose to him to
                                             us
translate, for the journal he edited, Philip Bromberg’s important article
‘Interpersonal psychoanalysis and Self Psychology,’ which appeared in No.
                                          al

4/1993. Mitchell had pointed it out to me, in order to make the work of one
                                       ci


of his most important friends and collaborators known in Italy as well. It was
                                  er



the first paper by Bromberg to be published in Italian.
                              m




    It was at this point that Bollati Boringhieri purchased the rights to pub-
lish Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. An integration as part of the
                        om




‘Programma di Psicologia Psichiatria Psicoterapia’ coordinated by Pier
Francesco Galli but giving the book a title that was perhaps commercially
                    -c




useful but scientifically misleading. I would have preferred a literal transla-
              on




tion such as ‘Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. An integration,’ but I
was not consulted on this. However, by this time I was no longer - shall we
           N




say - the only Italian who knew Stephen Mitchell well, and he gradually
became part of the collective heritage in our field thanks to this book. As far
as I am concerned, I would like to mention only that, since I - in the last part
of my Book Presentation - mentioned Luciana Nissim Momigliano (1919-
1998) - who in 1992 edited with Andreina Robutti the important anthology,
The shared experience: Essays on the psychoanalytic relationship, I was
contacted by her through the historian Michele Ranchetti (1925-2008) and
invited to visit her in her studio in Milan, Via dei Chiostri. I went there - on
a hot afternoon in June 1993 - and she told me how much she had enjoyed
the book, how much she felt in tune with Mitchell’s way of working, and
how she had been looking forward to meeting me, as I was not an SPI can-
didate. It was this kind of open attitude that facilitated the reception of
Mitchell’s work within the Italian Psychoanalytic Society - and secured for
me a constructive contact with the latter.
                               Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996                             81



And how does this story continue?

    I have already far exceeded the space I was granted for my account,
which means I had better stop here at this point in my story, although it was
my intention to go at least as far back as 1996. The other topics I covered
in the above-mentioned 2019 chapter are: the evolution of my relationship
with Mitchell, in the light of our correspondence by mail and fax, and the
publication in 1995 of Hope and dread in psychoanalysis, accompanied by
my short Presentation. Then in 1996 it was the turn of The experience of
psychoanalysis, which Mitchell wrote together with his wife Margaret
Black. Both are texts that I still regularly use in my analytic teaching. The
same goes for the next book, Influence and autonomy in psychoanalysis,
which was published in 1999 in Mariella Schepisi’s translation, but which




                                                                      ly
Mitchell had presented in its basic outlines as part of the seminar I had orga-




                                                             on
nized for him in Florence, with the help of Adriana Ramacciotti, at the
Institute of Neuroscience on April 13, 1996. It was a very well-attended

                                                  e
seminar, which I discussed in detail in the 2019 book - but which I would
                                               us
have gladly reported on even earlier, if, for example, I had been invited to
do so by Vittorio Lingiardi, Gherardo Amadei, Giorgio Caviglia and
                                            al

Francesco De Bei for their 2011 volume La svolta relaizonale. Itinerari ital-
                                        ci


iani. The same is probably also true for Cesare Albasi, the author of the first
                                   er



Italian dissertation on Mitchell, which he discussed with me in Brescia in
                              m




the mid-1990s (see Albasi, 2018), regarding his contribution to the recep-
tion of Mitchell’s work in Italy.2
                      om




    Then my life changed direction. Between the spring of 1996 and the
autumn of 1997 it took such a turn that it shifted its centre of gravity from the
                 -c




University of Brescia (where I had been a an Asssistant Professor of
           on




Psychiatry since 1991), and from Trento (where I lived), to Munich, where I
still work today. Since 1999 as a German Kassenpsychoanalytiker - after hav-
       N




ing worked as a Guest Professor at the University of Munich’s Psychiatric


    2    A third colleague whom Vittorio Lingiardi, Gherardo Amadei, Giorgio Caviglia and
Francesco De Bei could have invited to contribute a chapter of their own to the volume The
Relational Turning Point, Italian Itineraries is Marco Bacciagaluppi, who also comes to mind
because, in a studied coincidence with the morning spent with Mitchell on Saturday 13 April
1996, in the afternoon a number of participants in the meeting with Mitchell met - in the
Sullivan Institute - for one of the founding meetings of OPIFER (Organisation of Italian
Psychoanalysts, Federation and Register), which he had firmly wanted and implemented at the
time. A Milanese physician and psychiatrist who was a pupil of Galli, Benedetti and Cremerius,
Marco Bacciagaluppi - with whom I have been in regular contact for almost thirty years -
deserves the merit of having promoted the reception in Italy not only of the work of Silvano
Arieti (1914-1981), of whom he was an excellent translator, but also of Erich Fromm and John
Bowlby. He recorded his life, his clinical activity and his scientific contributions in his autobi-
ographical book Appunti autobiografici di uno psicoanalista relazionale (2018).
82                                  Marco Conci



Clinic from 1997 to 1999. In fact, I was so busy that I missed the chance to
be with Mitchell in September 1998 in Lindau, on Lake Constance, where the
German DGPT (the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse und
Tiefenpsychologie, the German Society for Psychoanalysis and Deep
Psychology) invited him to its annual congress to deliver one of its plenary
lectures. Well, even in Germany Mitchell aroused such interest and sympathy
(see Buchholz, 2003) that his first and only visit was followed by the transla-
tion of three of his books. Two of them are The relational model. From attach-
ment to intersubjectivity and Can love last? The fate of romantic love, pub-
lished in Italian in 2002 and 2003 by the publisher Raffaello Cortina and in
Francesco Gazzillo’s translation - also coinciding with the management crisis
that hit Bollati Boringhieri at the time. Incidentally, I do not know of any of
Mitchell’s books in French, while I know of a good reception in Spanish.




                                                              ly
     Mitchell died suddenly of an acute myocardial infarction at the age of 54




                                                         on
on the morning of 21 December 2000 at his home in New York, leaving us all
orphans of such a competent, creative and original colleague. And he was so

                                                 e
committed to redeeming both Sullivan’s legacy and the role of American psy-
                                              us
chologists that he created a new ‘psychoanalytic tradition’, as he called it in
his Preface to the mighty 1999 anthology Relational psychoanalysis. The
                                           al

emergence of a tradition. Shortly before he died, he created the International
                                       ci


Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP). And
                                   er



it is precisely my attempt to assess his legacy that takes up the last part of my
                               m




2019 chapter - to which I refer the reader. A balance sheet that I can sum-
marise in the following few words: Relational Psychoanalysis will continue
                        om




to make an important contribution to the psychoanalytic discourse to the
extent that it will not give up interacting with it in the complexity of its entire
                    -c




history, starting with Freud, instead of trying to develop only its own dis-
               on




course, separate and autonomous from it. Indeed, Jack Foehl (Boston), since
2021 one of the four co-editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, is also of this
           N




opinion, as is evident in his positive review of my 2019 book published in the
American Journal of Psychoanalysis.
     The same applies to the ‘Ferenczian colleague’ Jay Frankel, as he
explained in detail in the interview to Alexandar Dimitrijevic, in course of
publication in the International Forum of Psychoanalysis. As well as to my
colleague Joyce Slochower, whom I had the opportunity of meeting at SIPRe
in Milan a few years ago where she had been invited by Michele Minolli and
Romina Coin. I refer to her recent paper ‘Going too far: Relational heroins
and relational excess’, published in 2018 in the volume edited by Lewis Aron,
Sue Grand and Slochower herself, with the eloquent title De-idealising rela-
tional theory - A critique from within. Incidentally, this book also contains a
very interesting interview by Lewis Aron to Jay Greenberg, entitled ‘The
emergence of the relational tradition’.
     But it is on a different note that I would like to end my contribution. The
                              Stephen Mitchell in Italy, 1988-1996                           83



history of psychoanalysis - a field that is unfortunately not sufficiently culti-
vated in our country - presupposes that we should give equal importance, as
I have done in this contribution, to the personality of an author, to the context
in which he developed his ideas, to our encounter with him, and to the factors
that made the reception of his work possible. The same applies, for example,
to Otto Kernberg’s work, which we cannot truly understand without having
experienced him in person, and without having spoken to him in person - as
I did, following Paolo Migone’s example. And this opportunity, to bring to
Italy a psychoanalysis that speaks a language that is different from ours, was
one of the most important challenges of our generation, and many other
examples could be given - for example Franco de Masi with regard to the
work of Herbert Rosenfeld (1910-1986). Having overcome this challenge has
finally allowed us, Italian psychoanalysts, to perfect our own psychoanalysis




                                                                     ly
to such an extent that we in turn can contribute to its development on an inter-




                                                            on
national level (see also Conci, 2008).


                                                 e
                                              us
                                       REFERENCES
                                           al

Albasi, C. (2018). Introduzione all’edizione italiana. In: R. E. Barsness, Competenze cliniche
   nella psicoanalisi relazionale (pp. XV-XVIII). Roma: Fioriti.
                                       ci


Aron, L. (1996). A meeting of minds: Mutuality in psychoanalysis. Hillsdale (NJ): Analytic
                                  er



   Press. Italian edition, 2004.
Bacciagaluppi, M. (2018). Appunti autobiografici di uno psicoanalista relazionale. Milano:
                             m




   Mimesis.
Benedetti, G. (1961). Prefazione. In: H. S. Sullivan, La moderna concezione della psichia-
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