You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In July 2019 I published a book with the title Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis, in which I connected the clinical approach of the abovementioned authors and their psychoanalytic perspective to their most important life experiences and to the scientific and interpersonal contexts in which their contributions developed, including the main partners accompanying their professional evolution. I thus tried to demonstrate not only the importance of the history of psychoanalysis for the practicing clinician, but also its relevance as a key to the pluralistic and international character of contemporary psychoanalysis.
A pioneer of the field of “comparative psychoanalysis,” the sociologist Edith Kurzweil (1924-2016) showed in her 1989 book The Freudians. A comparative perspective how psychoanalysis differs in the various countries of the world, and how we should take cultural, social, and political factors into consideration, together with the theoretical ones. According to Jay Greenberg and Stephen Mitchell (1983), Roy Schafer (1922-2018) had been the pioneer of the kind of theoretically grounded “comparative psychoanalysis” so well articulated by them in Object relations in psychoanalytic theory. Although I helped Stephen Mitchell (1946-2000) introduce and promote his work in Italy, and still value very much his generous and creative contribution, I ended up appreciating Joseph Sandler’s (1927-1998) “mixed model” more than a simply relational model like the one Mitchell started formulating in 1988 through Relational concepts in psychoanalysis. An integration. Out of it came an important enrichment of our clinical work, but also an underevaluation of the complexity of psychoanalysis, Mitchell having downplayed several dimensions of it, that is, not only the originality and ongoing value of Freud’s contribution, but also, for example, the importance of empirical research. My book was so well received that it won the Amer