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Italian psychoanalyst Marco Bacciagaluppi has been at the forefront of relational psychoanalysis for several decades. He tells us in the introduction that after his postgraduate education in genetics, evolutionary theory and neurology, he trained in the interpersonal-cultural school in New York under Clara Thompson, Erich Fromm, and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. He attended the New School for Social Research where Fromm and Ferenczi had lectured and he maintained a long correspondence with John Bowlby. Paradigms in Psychoanalysis: An Integration is Bacciagaluppi's effort to present in a fresh light the seminal work of the pioneers of relational psychoanalysis—Ferenczi, Fromm, and Bowlby—and combine their work with other important “paradigms” that will help us understand our patients and the human condition. Twenty-eight of his own publications are referenced in the book.
The relational model has been in ascendance in the United States over the past several decades coincident with the decline of classical ego psychology (Gabbard, Litowitz, & Williams, 2012). In Paradigms in Psychoanalysis, Bacciagaluppi takes Freud to task for his mistakes, inconsistencies, and contradictions. He says that Freud turned his own paradigm into an ideology, even a cult. Former colleagues and confidants who disagreed with the master were expelled from the realm. At the same time, I believe that it is important to keep in mind that without Freud there would be no psychoanalysis. I think of Freud's psychoanalysis as analogous to “the baby” in Winnicott's famous dictum: “There is no such thing as a baby … a baby cannot exist alone, but is essentially part of a relationship” (Winnicott, 1966, p. 88). Freud gave birth to “the baby,” his one-person psychoanalysis, and those who followed him have extended his paradigm and placed it into a relationship with an increasing number of subsequent paradigms. (For a discussion of what parts of Freud's work have and have not endured see Breger, 2012).
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