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I had the good luck to meet Horst Kächele for the first time more than 20 years ago, in May 1990, in Venice, in the context of the very first conference held in Italy on psychotherapy research. I was so fascinated by his approach to psychoanalysis that I volunteered to translate into Italian one of his latest articles, “Psychoanalytische Therapieforschung 1930–1990” (Research in psychoanalytic therapy 1930–1990), which had appeared in the June 1993 issue of the Milan journal Setting (Kächele, 1993).
Before meeting him, I had already read, in the original German, the two volumes of Lehrbuch der psychoanalytischen Therapie (1985, 1988), the Textbook of Psychoanalytic Therapy, which he and Helmut Thomä had written together. One of the reasons I could appreciate their work so much had to do with the fact that Johannes Cremerius (1918–2002) and Gaetano Benedetti had already, during my training at the Milan Scuola di Psicoterapia Psicoanalitica, put me in touch with the “German tradition” from which such a textbook came. For example, Cremerius had been very much influenced by Michael Balint (1896–1970), as Thomä himself had been. It had also been through Cremerius that I had come into contact with the German tradition of analytically oriented psychosomatic medicine – a medical field in which Thomä and Kächele worked – that is, with the legacies of Alexander Mitscherlich (1908–1982) and of his own mentor, Viktor von Weiszäcker (1886–1957). Helmut Thomä had worked in Heidelberg under Mitscherlich before coming to Ulm in 1968.
Last but not least, through Gaetano Benedetti, Helmut Thomä had come into contact with the Italian group that published the journal Psicoterapia e scienze umane, founded by Pier Francesco Galli in 1967. In the context of the journal's network, I met Thomä in Bologna in June 1991 at the International Workshop organized by Galli and centered around papers given by Morris Eagle, Robert Holt and Frank Sulloway.
Since our very first