A World of Yesterday1

This paper was written for a special occasion, a meeting in Mexico City, in April 1999, on ‘Women Analysts at the End of the Millennium’. The meeting never took place as planned, but some readers felt the paper should be published as written. It is a straightforward account of the historic figures I met in the psychoanalytic scene in Europe and the USA, a complex tapestry portraying ‘a world of yesterday’ that resonates with the recollections of my colleagues.

I had just finished my Residency in Pediatrics at the University of Rome (July 1947), during which I had sadly realized how limited was the care that we were able to offer, as pediatricians, to the sick children, particularly the very young ones, since we considered mostly their body functions, when I got a fellowship to the USA. This took me to New York Hospital and to the recently established Institute of Child Development (Director Milton Senn), where Benjamin Spock had been for years.

While attending this Institute, however, in spite of excellent colleagues such as Sally Provence and Eleanor Galenson, I realized, as I had previously done with Arnold Gesell at Yale, that this too was not the place I was looking for my training. The only remarkable event I had experienced at Yale had been my meeting Dr Edith B. Jackson, and her rooming-in concepts, not new for us at the time, but which were to become revolutionary less than five years later in Italy (Jackson & Klatskin 1950).

In New York, in February 1948, I met Margaret Mahler, who took me for a lunch to the Green House in Central Park. We spoke for a couple of hours. She showed great interest in the vicissitudes of the war and in my critical views on pediatric formation. She then firmly suggested Boston as the place for me to be trained, since Lucie Jessner, an analyst particularly interested in children, had recently been appointed Director of the Department of Child Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, in the position which was originally held by E