Marco Conci interviews Marco Bacciagaluppi

I have known Marco Bacciagaluppi for many years. As a matter of fact, I first met him on Saturday, January 20, 1990, in Bologna, when he gave the paper “Fromm's analytic technique and its application to narcissistic patients” at the International Seminars organized by the journal Psicoterapia e scienze umane. I had been working since 1988 to collect the material necessary to write the book on H. S. Sullivan, which eventually came out in Italy in 2000, and the help from and exchanges I had with Marco on a whole series of neofreudian themes were very useful and valuable.

It was through him that I got to know Rainer Funk (Fromm's literary executor, and the author of his most authoritative biography) and Michael Maccoby (the social psychologist with whom Fromm had conducted the psychosocial research reported in their 1970 book Social Character in a Mexican Village). The meeting with Funk and Maccoby took place in Heidelberg (Germany), on Saturday, March 24, 1990, at the congress organized by Funk for the tenth anniversary of Fromm's death (which took place in Locarno, Switzerland, on March 18, 1980). It was again through Marco that, in September 1992, I met Mauricio Cortina at the Washington School of Psychiatry—the training institute founded by Sullivan in 1936.

I also recall having often visited Marco in his office in Milan, where until July 1993 I spent at least one day a week because of my training at the Associazione di Studi Psicoanalitici. As a matter of fact, I think he must have been the first colleague to give me precise information about authors such as John Bowlby (with whom he was in correspondence) and Harry Guntrip—and from whom I could borrow books such as Personality Structure and Human Interaction and Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, both by Guntrip. He also was the first one to allow me to consult, and now and then borrow, the volumes of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (the W. A. White Institute journal, founded in 1964) and of the Journal