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The death of Alessandra Cavalli has been a great loss to the wider Jungian and child therapy communities, with shock and sorrow felt by patients, friends and colleagues both in England and internationally.
Born in Italy, the eldest of a large family, Alessandra grew up in the small town of Concordia, north of Bologna. She did undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Munich and married a German physicist. The couple moved to Brussels, where she worked in a children's museum, and in 1998 she came to London to train as a child analyst at the Society of Analytical Psychology. In parallel she also did the SAP adult training and by 2004 had qualified for both.
In her work with child, adolescent and adult patients, Alessandra drew on many traditions and found a way of integrating multiple analytic languages into a coherent clinical model. In addition to earlier generations of child analysts from the SAP such as Michael Fordham, James Astor, Jane Bunster and Mara Sidoli, she was influenced by many psychoanalytic thinkers, including her close friend Gianna Williams, with whom she taught at the Tavistock.
After the SAP child training closed, Alessandra continued to carry the flame of Jungian child analysis with huge energy and determination. Aside from being a very active and creative member of the SAP, her outreach was enormous. Fluent in five languages, she taught and lectured widely and was able to work with a variety of patients and in different cultures. She was closely involved in the development of child analysis in Russia and supervised in Bulgaria and Hungary. Her profound belief in the significance of early life was shared in the infant observations seminars she ran in the UK and Denmark.
In Mexico, with Gianna Williams, she supervised for a project providing ‘Special Time’ for homeless children. A letter from Mexican colleagues describes her work there: ‘Alessandra understood difficult situations and contained us, and she did it with empathy…. This is what she did eve