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No other European country has such strong ties with the American interpersonal tradition as Italy. It all started at the end of the 1950s, when Pier Francesco Galli—a pupil of Gaetano Benedetti—launched a publishing project to translate into Italian the works of Sullivan, Fromm-Reichmann, and Arieti (including the first edition of the American Handbook of Psychiatry, edited by Arieti). Galli later continued the tradition of a pluralistic psychoanalytic approach by editing Psicoterapia e scienze umane—possibly the best Italian psychoanalytic journal.
I gave some personal contributions to these developments by belonging to Galli's original group in Milan, spending a year in New York in 1963-64 to attend Arieti's courses, and later translating most of his books into Italian. Recently, together with a group of colleagues, I founded OPIFER, an organization of independent Italian psychoanalysts, many of whom—like the editors of the anthology under review—continue the interpersonal tradition in Italy.
Although several generations of Italian psychiatrists were influenced by the translations and by Galli's journal, the interpersonal tradition in Italy has always remained a minority. Italian psychiatry is even more biological than it used to be, and Italian Freudian psychoanalysis continues to ignore alternative approaches. Thus, 40 years after the interpersonal tradition was introduced into Italy, it is timely that this tradition should be brought once more to the attention of the public by this fine anthology of interpersonal writings, edited by Marco Conci, Sergio Dazzi, and Maria Luisa Mantovani, who all share a background of training in America.
After a joint introduction by the three editors, each editor introduces a section of his/her own. Marco Conci introduces the first part, on origins and developments, which includes writings by Fromm and Sullivan—the two pioneers—as well as a recent paper by Stephen Mitchell. Maria Luisa Mantovani was in charge of the second part, on