Introduction

I vividly remember first meeting Eric Brenman, about thirty years ago, when, as a young Intern in Psychiatry (and as a future candidate of the British Society), I was asked to be the translator for the seminars which he and Irma were running at the Milan Institute. This was my first contact with ‘real life’ clinical Kleinian analysis: my analytical knowledge, up to then, was somewhat limited, coloured by a touch of idealization and largely theoretical.

What struck me, at the time, was Eric Brenman’s passion for the clinical work, his humanity, his clinical acumen, his capacity to ‘take the patient in’, to move fluently from the experiential to the theoretical, and to transform the scattered elements of a patient’s history and background, as they emerged in the transference, into a complex, intriguing narrative about human conflicts, desires, loving and hateful feelings, in a rounded, never reductionist way, where internal and external reality, past and present, became interwoven and mutually resonant with meaning. You felt the analyst and the patient were two real human beings struggling together, sharing a journey which was never easy but always compelling.

I remember him to be also rather partial to good Italian food and wine, which I took to be part of his natural ability to recognize ‘good objects’ and tune in with them. My resolve to come to England to train as an analyst was very much strengthened by this good experience and I am grateful to Eric for it.

I felt very pleased and honoured to be asked to be the English editor of his book, a task which I think of, at a personal level, as a ‘recovery’ of a past good ‘psychoanalytical object’ and of my Italian roots.

This book is adapted from the one originally published in 2002 in Italy, by the Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi ‘Cesare Musatti’, edited by Roberto

Basile, Paola Capozzi, Franco De Masi, Patrizia Gammaro Moroni, Dino Lanzara and Federico Rocca: it was meant as a tribute to Eric Brenman as a remarkable c