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The author, Marco Conci, does not belong to a single cultural and linguistic sphere: he was born in Italy where he also studied medicine and psychiatry and trained as an analyst; whereas he teaches in Italy, most of his analytic work is done in Munich, Germany; and, although a member of the DPG, he is thoroughly versed in North American psychiatric and psychoanalytic culture. Through his role in the International Forum of Psychoanalysis he works tirelessly to connect these three worlds.
For over 30 years he has been passionately engaged in the study of Sullivan and of interpersonal psychiatry and psychotherapy, while also making valuable contributions to research on the history of psychoanalysis: he produced valuable essays on the Freud-Silberstein correspondence, on Edoardo Weiss, the first Italian psychoanalyst, and on Gertrude Schwing, psychiatric nurse and psychoanalyst. The choice of the interpersonal approach to theory and technique has led him to promote the work of Mitchell in Italy and the German-speaking countries.
By virtue of the historical and philological method which he applies to problems of theory and technique, together with his profound erudition, he is manifestly endowed with a unique depth of understanding and epistemological awareness. His personal position too is unique, having always steered him in the direction of intellectual independence and curiosity. His book on Sullivan, published in Italian and German, is intended to fill a gap in Italian psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic culture, which has never fully engaged with that author's thought. The works of Harry Stack Sullivan have in fact existed in Italian translation since the 1960s, and have, through the figure of Pier Francesco Galli, certainly had some influence at a subterranean level. However, it is only since the mid-1980s, with the dissemination of the work of Mitchell, that the interpersonal paradigm has come to be more openly naturalized in the world of Italian psychoanalysis.
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