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I am writing these few words of introduction after finishing and reviewing this interview in preparation for submission to our editorial board. The interview was conducted by email (directly in English) and its realization took more time than we had thought it would, that is, from October 2013 until February 2017. There were several intervals during which no exchange was going on, but I can say that we kept thinking about each other and that this project was always important for us.
In the first place, it was important for me because of the way in which my meeting and collaboration with Michael changed my personal and professional life. Our meeting through the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) in Stockholm in August 1991 (at the conference organized by our Swedish colleagues, on the topic “Male and female themes in psychoanalysis,” the VIth IFPS Conference overall) was followed by the development of such a good relationship that not only was I able to work (from fall 1997 to fall 1999) as a guest professor at the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, which Michael directed at the University of Munich, but I also ended up moving to Munich as a psychoanalyst. I became in 2002 a member of the Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (DPG; the German Psychoanalytic Society), in 2007 a co-editor-in-chief of this journal, and in 2010 (after the DGP’s readmittance to the International Psychoanalytical Association [IPA]) a member of the IPA. In other words, I also personally experienced many of the events and developments in which Michael was a protagonist.
From this point of view, I want to say how much I value Michael’s unique capacity for international dialogue and collaboration, that is, his unique role in such apparently contradictory enterprises as the rapprochment of his society, the DPG, with the IPA, and his important role in the life of our Federation (the IFPS), of whose executive committee he