A Cognitive Therapist Meets John Bowlby

In one of the lectures collected under the title A Secure Base, John Bowlby describes the background to his paper ‘On knowing what you are not supposed to know and on feeling what you are not supposed to feel’ (Bowlby, 1988, Lecture 6), stating that the paper had been the occasion and the origin of various lectures. He wrote: ‘On one such occasion, in Rome, I met with two cognitive therapists, Giovanni Liotti and Vittorio Guidano, and was surprised and delighted to find how much we had in common’ (p. 99).

I have been invited to write about this meeting with Bowlby, and to report on what two obscure cognitive therapists working in Rome could have had ‘in common’, during the 1970s, with the thought of one of the greatest psychiatrists and psychoanalysts of the second half of the past century. I think that this story would not be worth telling except for the illustration it provides of John Bowlby's open-mindedness and intellectual generosity.1 In accepting the invitation, therefore, my aim is to inform those readers of this Journal, who may never have met Bowlby, about his emotional availability, and his attentiveness - an attitude he freely and generously displayed in the interactions with colleagues who asked for his advice, not just something he preached to parents of young children.

In the early 1970s I was a young psychiatrist at the beginning of his professional career, deeply dissatisfied with the precept of treating my patients only pharmacologically, but at the same time I was looking for inexpensive psychological treatments that almost every patient could afford. Besides this socio-economic reason for looking at treatments different from psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, I also believed that psychotherapy should entertain a close dialogue with basic research in experimental psychology - a belief that was not shared by the psychoanalytic community in Italy in those years. On the basis of these beliefs, I decided to be trained in cognitive and beh