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In July 2019 one of us (M.C.) published a book with the title Freud, Sullivan, Mitchell, Bion, and the multiple voices of international psychoanalysis, in which he connected the clinical approach of those 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. He 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.
In the fall of 2018, M.C. had been contacted by Eva Papiasvili (New York) and Arne Jemstedt (Stockholm), who invited him to collaborate on the preparation of the item “Ego psychology” for the Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (IRED). The IRED was originally conceived by Stefano Bolognini at the time of his IPA presidency (2013-2017), and is published online by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). The task that M.C. readily accepted was to contribute to the revisitation of the development of ego psychology in Europe, the reconstruction of its development in North and South America being the task of the other two regional teams, with Arne Jemstedt coordinating the European team, and Eva Papiasvili coordinating the whole work.
Fascinated by such a research project and determined to do his best, M.C. came to the following two discoveries. In the first place, ego psychology had been alive and well in Europe - and not only in North America - both before and after World War II. Important ego psychologists after the war were, for example, Alexander Mitscherlich (1908-1982) and Paul Parin (1916-2009), who both emphasized its critical potential - which they considered to have been lost in the North American emigration. Also ego-psychologically based is the German Kassensystem