The Basic Mental Organization Eugenio Gaddini: Full Circle from Freud to Winnicott and Back to Freud

The term basic mental organization, sometimes referred to by the acronym BMO, was coined by Eugenio Gaddini in the last years of his scientific production, although it denotes a concept that had in fact been maturing throughout his career. The concept, at least under that name, was not further developed by others after him. So it is unusual to undertake a historico-critical commentary in such circumstances, restricted as it must be to the thought of a single author. The enterprise is rendered still more difficult by the fact that it has already been exhaustively accomplished, in a contribution (Mascagni, 1994) that to this day remains so authoritative that it could simply be summarized here without any need for supplementation.

However, it may in my opinion also be worthwhile to explore the heuristic value of Gaddini's concept in the context of general psychoanalytic theory and in terms of the reasons why it may still be necessary or indeed, to my mind, useful. Furthermore, this exploration may facilitate a review of the relationship between the contributions of D.W. Winnicott and those of Gaddini, considering that the latter has often, perhaps superficially, been seen — in the past by the present writer too1 — as a continuator (admittedly an original one, but a continuator nevertheless) of the British psychoanalyst. As I shall attempt to show in this paper, my own view is that this relationship is more complicated than it might at first appear, and that, although many of Winnicott's insights certainly represented an important stimulus for Gaddini to undertake an in-depth study of primitive psychic activity, he translated these insights and re-elaborated them within an independent trajectory of his own that was situated in a direct line of descent from Freud's metapsychology.

At first sight the concept of the basic mental organization would seem not to call for any further definition, as the term itself actually coincides with its definition; that is to say, it refers