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Gaetano Benedetti (1920–2013), after graduating from medical school in his hometown Catania (Italy), emigrated to Zurich so he could specialize in psychiatry at the Burghölzli, the psychiatric hospital directed by Eugen Bleuler’s son Manfred Bleuler (1904–1993). This allowed him to develop his personal interest in the psychotherapy of schizophrenia and related disorders in such a way as to not only renew the tradition of analytically informed psychiatry inaugurated by Eugen Bleuler and by C. G. Jung, but also to make of the Burghölzli a new pilot center in this field. This is why Benedetti was soon joined in Zurich by a whole series of colleagues, including the Finnish Marti Siirala (1922–2008) and the North American Norman Elrod (1928–2002), and why the Swiss colleague Christian Müller (2021–2013) joined Benedetti in the foundation of the International Symposium for the Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia (ISPS). Recently renamed the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS), it held its latest conferences in Helsinki (June 2024) and in Perugia (September 2022). Already in 1958, Marti Siirala, back in Helsinki, founded the Therapeia Foundation, one of the groups that joined our Federation at the end of the 1960s. The institute founded by Benedetti and Johannes Cremerius (1918–2002) in Milan in the early 1970s joined the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) in 1989, and the Institut für Psychoanalyse Zürich-Kreuzlingen funded by Elrod in 1996. This is the historical background of the first article of this issue, “Marti Siirala and Gaetano Benedetti – friends in the dialogical and psychotherapeutic sharing of burdens,” by Iuhani Ihanus (Helsinki). To such a background belongs also the work of Medard Boss (1903–1990), the founder of the Zurich Daseinsanalytische Institut, which also became a member society of the IFPS in the 1970s.
One of us (MC) having had Benedetti as a supervisor in the early 1990s in Milan,