A Short History of the Tavistock Model Courses in Italy

Gianna, could you tell us how the idea of taking the Tavistock Model Observation Course to Italy first arose?

I had been teaching in Rome at the Faculty of Child Neuro-Psychiatry, both lecturing and taking seminars. I met a number of people who wished, at some point, to come to London to train at the Tavistock. One of them asked me whether it would be possible to take at least part of the course there in Italy. For instance, when I was in Rome, could I take a work discussion seminar for people who may later wish to come to London? This made me think that, if it were possible to start one seminar of the ‘Observation Course’ in Italy, it may be possible to start the whole course, a course which I was familiar with because I was already teaching in it here at the Tavistock.

So how was the first Tavistock Model Observation Course in Italy set up? The first observation course started in October 1976. I spoke about it with Martha Harris in the spring of 1976. She was very enthusiastic about the idea and we thought together of a model that would reproduce the ‘Observation Course’ in a different country ‘under a different sky’, but with exactly the same number of seminars, the same amount of written work and also, and this is something Martha Harris felt rather strongly about, with the same teachers teaching here in London involved in the teaching in Rome. The reason for this faithful reproduction of the course in Italy was that, at that point, there was no idea of starting a clinical training in Italy and this course, if identical to the