Eugenio Gaddini (1916–1985)

Eugenio Gaddini died after a brief illness in September of last year. A past President of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society from 1978 to 1982, he was widely acknowledged as an outstanding representative of psychoanalysis at home and abroad. Tall, elegant and somewhat ascetic in appearance, he was a familiar figure at international gatherings. Gaddini belonged to that second generation of Italian psychoanalysts following that of Perrotti, Musatti and Servadio, who rescued psychoanalysis from the oblivion reaped on it by fascism. Born in Puglie, he was endowed with all the qualities of the intellectual Southern Italians: a thirst for knowledge; a capacity for sustained serious and deep thinking; a philosophical outlook, coupled with good humour. In 1942 he moved to Rome, where he took his medical degree, and he was soon in charge of a Red Cross Hospital, which gave him a solid foundation for much of his later work on the relationship between mind and body. Much reading of psychology and the experience with his patients led him to seek a personal analysis in 1946, with Emilio Servadio. It was not long before he was accepted for training which he completed in 1953. As is often the case in a small society, great pressures and demands were put on him to participate in the running of the Rome Centre of Psychoanalysis, at the time one of three Institutes forming the Italian Society. He took this somewhat rapid rise in his stride, whilst developing a full-time psychoanalytic practice.

Over the years, the preoccupation with the psychic components of early life was reflected in a series of papers, beginning with 'On rumination in infancy' (in Dynamic Psychopathology in Childhood, Grune and Stratton, New York, 1959), written in collaboration with his wife, Renata, a paediatrician and psychoanalyst. This was followed by papers on the primary bodily image and the phallic phase; 'uber Konstitutiv phenomena der Gegunubertradung' (Psyche, Heft 2 XVIII, Jg. 1964); 'Languag