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Giovanni Liotti, who sadly passed away in April 2018, was one of the fathers of cognitive psychotherapy in Italy, founder and past president of the Italian Society of Cognitive and Behavioural Therapy and prominent scholar of traumatic dissociation. Gianni (to friends and colleagues) used to describe himself as a “pied noire” because he was born in Tripoli (Libya) in 1945 and lived there until he was sixteen. In Tripoli he grew up inside a cultural melting pot where Italian, Arabic, and Jewish elements were integrated in a peaceful framework. This integrated multiplicity has been one of the main features of Gianni's personality and his intellectual background. He was indeed a tireless, inquiring researcher and intellectual, who explored and integrated very different fields of knowledge. This capacity brought him to personally meet John Bowlby and to become one of the most original scholars in the field of attachment theory, by both adopting the theory in the background of cognitive behavioural psychotherapy (Guidano & Liotti, 1983) and advancing the understanding of attachment disorganisation as a potential precursor of dissociation (Liotti, 1992).
In a milestone bestselling book that he wrote with Vittorio Guidano entitled Cognitive Processes and Emotional Disorders (1983), Liotti proposed attachment theory as a developmental theory for CBT. He hypothesised that the focus of CBT should be extended from irrational explicit beliefs to the implicit relational knowledge shaped by early attachment relationships. The therapy, in his view, consisted in the transformation of pathological beliefs about the self and the external world, using both cognitive strategies and the therapeutic relationship as a corrective emotional experience. This relational turn of Liotti's cognitive therapy brought Bowlby himself to state: “… the cognitive therapy that Liotti represents and the psychoanalytic therapy which I represent converge” (Tondo, 2011).
The friendship between Bowlby and Liot