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One of the main stimuli behind the idea of the project and the preparation of this monographic issue has come from our associate editor Carlo Bonomi, and his original and long work on the birth of psychoanalysis. This work started with his 1993 article “Why have we ignored Freud the ‘paediatrician’? The relevance of Freud's paediatric training for the origins of psychoanalysis,” and found its final elaboration in his 2023 book A brief apocalyptic history of psychoanalysis: Erasing trauma (Bonomi, 1993, 2023). Bonomi’s very thought-provoking research work allowed him to confirm how right Masson had been in following Ferenczi's late work, in terms of giving back to trauma the role that Freud himself had originally attributed to it. In fact, Bonomi’s work brought him so far as to edit a new Italian edition of Masson’s (1984) book, accompanying it with a long introduction (Bonomi, 2024).
In the context of this project, Bonomi organized a Zoom presentation of the book, Assalto alla verità. La rinuncia di Freud alla teoria della seduzione (Masson, 2024b), which took place in January 2025. Not only was Jeffrey Masson there, but we too (M.C. and G.C.) participated in it. As we had both been convinced of the seriousness of Masson's scholarship, with particular regard for his work as editor of the Complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, and as we had ourselves benefited from it, the online personal contact made possible by the Zoom conference motivated us not only to read (or re-read) all his psychoanalytic books, but also to start thinking about the organization of this monographic issue.
In fact, although Masson abandoned the field of psychoanalysis after his excommunication by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), he continued to spend his time and energy on trying to understand what had brought about such a terrible conflict with the Freudian establishment. This had been so bad as to force him to give up his analytic career and identity