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Riccardo Lombardi, M.D., is a psychiatrist, child and adolescent psychoanalyst, and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI) in Rome, where he works in private practice. He approaches psychoanalytic thinking as an “open work” constantly evolving — something to examine and question. Central to his clinical thinking is the Body-Mind connection (and disconnection) that he locates at the core of primitive mental states and as the foundation for developing the capacity to think.
The conversation that follows occurred by email between Riccardo Lombardi and Patricia Marra, from their respective cities of Rome and San Francisco, in early August 2016.
PM: Let's start with your own development in psychoanalysis. How did you get interested in psychoanalysis and where and with whom did you study and do your training?
RL: I became acquainted with psychoanalysis through my courses in clinical psychology while studying medicine. In the beginning, I studied medicine to become a surgeon like my father. I did work with him in private clinics, and then I frequented the surgery departments at the Catholic University in Rome. I shifted to psychiatry because I was fascinated by the irrational and the illogical as an area to explore through scientific instruments.
I grew up as a child immersed in anthropology — in the south of Italy — where magic has an important role and illnesses are connected to the Evil Eye's influences. During my residence in Psychiatry at the Catholic University, I was mainly impressed by the teaching of Matte Blanco and Salomon Resnik. Matte Blanco's approach met my interest in exploring the dark and confused areas of the mind with a rational laser precision. His reading of Freud was exciting because he emphasized the continuous contradictions of
the Freudian text as an expression of his effort to translate a multidimensional reality that is beyond Aristotelian logic. I never loved math, so I was unable to follow Matte Blanco in t