Editorial

Early one morning in July 2001 I was woken up by a telephone call in my hotel room in Nice, where I was then staying for a congress. It took me a minute or two to recognize the brisk voice of Professor Renata Gaddini, the prominent Italian child psychoanalyst whose ‘A world of yesterday’ we had not long before published in Psychoanalysis and History (2(1): 29-36).

She wanted to ask me, I soon discovered, whether our journal might have an interest in her correspondence with Donald W. Winnicott. Before I had time to properly consider the importance of her offer (I was not fully awake yet …), she added that she hoped I would accept it, as she believed Psychoanalysis and History to be the most suitable ‘home’ for such material. I thanked her profusely for her generous words and asked her to please send me those letters after the summer holidays.

She did, a few months later, and I soon realized their remarkable value: not only insofar as they contain a number of original scientific observations by both Gaddini and Winnicott, but also because of the many personal aspects of the relationship between the correspondents, as friends and as mutually respectful colleagues, emerging with great vividness from those letters.

We made the editorial decision to present most of the letters in their entirety, but to select for publication only those of them (the majority, anyway, of those we had received) which we believed would be of interest to our readers, leaving out those which only amounted to, say, an exchange of information about a possible date for a visit, or a word of thanks for a nice postcard.

I then invited Nina Farhi—the former Director of ‘The Squiggle Foundation’ in London, who is particularly well acquainted with Gaddini's, as well as Winnicott's, work—to comment on our editorial selection (which she promptly agreed with) and to write herself an ‘Introduction’, that would contextualize the material within the history of the relationship between the correspondents and clar