1.
First of all: is it really interesting to talk about Italian psychoanalysis?
Very few are actually interested in Italian psychoanalysis: up until now, Italy has not produced as many famous “masters” in this field as has Austria, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, the US, and other countries. Hence the widespread—and partly unjust—belief that Italian psychoanalysis is largely insignificant. Which is unjust, because I believe the average level of Italian analysts is rather high. Rather, the fact is that we lack charismatic and internationally well-known personalities. In the field of psychoanalysis we do not have the equivalent of the great Italian personalities that dominated the arts, literature, fashion, cinema, or philosophy.
Rather, Italy has produced famous names in psychiatry: Cesare Lombroso (a neurologist who theorized the “born criminal”), Enrico Tanzi (notable for his studies on paranoia), Ugo Cerletti (the inventor of electroshock therapy), Franco Basaglia (the reformer of mental asylums). So psychiatrists, not psychoanalysts.
One of the best-known Italian analysts was… a Chilean, Ignacio Matte Blanco (1908–1995), who can be considered Italian because he lived in Rome for more than 40 years. Yet his most well-known book, The Unconscious as an Infinite Set, was first published in English.[1] A few of his disciples presently practice in Italy. Another well-know analyst is Edoardo Weiss (1889–1948), a direct disciple of Freud albeit from Trieste, then port of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Weiss became famous because he published in English after migrating to the United States in 1939.[2] Eugenio Gaddini (1916–1985) is also well-known in Anglo-American countries, especially for his work on child psychoanalysis.[3] However, beyond these and a few living analysts, the list of famous Italian analysts is soon exhausted.
With the exception, today, of Elvio Fachinelli, who is beginning to be translated into English and is thus becoming known in the anglophone world.
Some believe that Italians are not in the limelight in the field of psychoanalysis because it is an exquisitely “gothic” activity, while Italian culture, as is known, excels when it is about the exquisite “appearance” of the baroque surfaces of fashion and art, music and food. Our Renaissance genius leads us to privilege the outer form over the inner abyss. This explains why Italians are the greatest exporters of la dolce vita (cuisine, arts, wine/liquor, design, fashion, bel canto, divas), while in so-called deeper activities—such as mystical literature, theoretical physics, mathematics, psychoanalysis—importation prevails.
And when we achieve good results in psychotherapy, we do so in more extroverted than introverted fields: group analysis, family therapy, institutional analysis, social psychiatry.
Moreover, psychoanalysis was created mainly by Jews—in American movies the analyst is usually a Jewish doctor with a German accent—and in Italy, Jews are few, only a few thousand. [4] Moreover Italian analysts lack an international audience because they write in a tongue which is spoken only in Italy.
Undoubtedly, one of the clichés abroad about Italians is that they “are not good analysts,” much like “the mafia rules Italy,” or “all Italian men are womanizers”; but like many commonplaces, something is true and something is false.
What is true: too many Italian analysts are spell-struck by their foreign “headquarters,” playing the (often profitable) role of followers. Kleinians and Bionians look only to London, Lacanians only to Paris, Jungians to Zurich or Texas, and so on. We are good disciples—sometimes also at the top of our class—but not masters. And when some choose to later become dissidents and in turn masters, they often fall into the inverse defect: they lock themselves in their own small and cozy school formed almost exclusively by their analysands and direct pupils, usually on a regional or city scale—in short, for them it suffices to play at home talking to their faithful. This is not exactly the best way to promulgate one’s original analytical approach beyond the national borders.
What is false: precisely because we lack Great Masters, our schools are less rigid and dogmatic than in other countries. Our Kleinians, Lacanians, Winnicottians, Jungians, etc., are often less rigid. Perhaps in Italy a sort of heterodox, eclectic, unclassifiable psychoanalytic koiné or community is slowly building up—where dialogue is easier than in other countries.
Certainly having been disciples of Great Masters is a great advantage. But if the Master is too grand, s/he risks blocking the creativity of the best disciples: rather than discovering their own road, eternal pupils will spend their whole life imprisoned in the golden and comfortable ghetto of the Master’s Thought.
2.
Another reason for the relatively low development of psychoanalysis in Italy is the fact that the highest model for an Italian intellectual was and is, even today, political commitment in the agora. This reflects historicism’s impact in the previous centuries (Vico, De Sanctis, Croce, Gentile, Gramsci), and its basic assumption that “History shapes our souls.” Historicists tend to think that brooding over sexuality, intimate fantasies, dreams, and slips of the tongue is a waste of time: “reality calls us!”
This historicist tradition also penetrated Italian psychiatry. For two decades, more than one generation of psychiatrists was fascinated by Franco Basaglia (1924–1980), a Marxist trained in phenomenological philosophy and psychiatry who was hostile to psychoanalysis, which he considered a mere “technique” for the bourgeois clientele. However, his generous apostolate to free psychotic patients from squalid asylums—real jails for the fringes of society—had a great impact on Italian public opinion in the 1970s. His anti-institutional crusade had some affinity with the Anglo-American anti-psychiatric challenge (Laing, Esterson, Cooper, Szasz), but concentrated rather on the destruction of psychiatric hospitals, and their replacement with what in Anglophone countries is called community care, and in Italy servizi nel territorio.[5]. Basaglia’s campaign was fully rewarded in 1979, when the Italian Parliament approved the famous “Law 180,” which forbids any form of psychiatric incarceration of the mentally ill against their will, except for critical, but rather brief, periods (a law basically still applied in Italy).
Basaglian psychiatrists completely dismissed the study of the mind and/or the brain. Their psychiatry was essentially an extensive and intensive social welfare: housing for the mentally ill, endless discussions with bureaucrats and politicians to change local norms, pensions or allocations for the disabled, etc. All practical things, certainly indispensable, but nothing that had to do with the unconscious. For them the soul was a kind of bourgeois caprice, and the poor, of course, have no soul—the poor have only social-historical needs. Needs, not desires.
In this sense, Basaglian psychiatry carried on a long tradition among intellectuals since the Risorgimento (1848–1870), when a writer or philosopher had to be foremost a militant patriot, a garibaldino, i.e., a revolutionary activist. This tradition found its most powerful expression in Gramsci’s famous theory about the role of the “organic intellectual.” Also today, at a time when the Italian intellectual is far from Marxism or nationalism, one of his highest ideals is to become a member of Parliament or a minister, or in the worst case, a party bureaucrat[6] (even if today the dream of the politique politicienne has largely been replaced with the dream to appear in the media, especially on TV). In 2005, the Italian parliament and the group of Italian deputies in the Strasbourg parliament included a very high number of philosophers. Philosophy professors are or have been mayors of important cities (such as Venice), ministers, leaders of major political parties, and a philosophy professor served as the president of the Italian Senate from 2001 to 2006. This political professionalization of the Italian philosopher is quite different from the engagement of the typical Parisian intellectual, for example: the latter often takes an active part in major political debates but stays away from elections, party life, and parliamentary politics. Certainly, this visible political engagement of philosophers is very different from the sedentary, shadowy, and mostly silent job of psychoanalysis.
3.
A strong sign of the primacy of “the social dimension” in Italy—or, if you prefer, of extroversion over introversion—is the success of Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) and of the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute, based in California. The theory developed here, namely the systemic and relational approach, has inspired most “family psychotherapy” in Italy, where it has enjoyed a popularity perhaps higher than in any other country. Credit for its success mostly goes to Mara Selvini Palazzoli (1916–1999), a family psychotherapist in Milan whose influence went far beyond Italy. The basic assumption of this approach is that the mentally ill individual does not exist, rather his whole family is ill; the person “designated” as neurotic, psychotic, anorexic, etc., is only a symptom of his “family system,” or in general of the group or institution s/he belongs to. Thus, the “relational-systemic” therapist cures the entire family through sessions where they often prescribe paradoxical behavior (these prescriptions are often taken from the techniques of Zen wisdom).
In Italy Bateson was elevated to the level of a first-rate philosophical star, while in his native Britain hardly anybody reads him anymore, while in the US some recall him as an “ecological” author from the 1960s. But his success in Italy, as well as that of his follower Paul Watzlawick (who worked in Palo Alto), can also be attributed to the fact that their thinking gives no place to the individual subject: everything is “system,” that is a continuous network of human communication. In fact, it is only with difficulty that Italians can conceive of themselves as solitary, private subjects. So many Italian psychologists, formed by Gramsci’s and Lukacs’ Marxism, found in this “ecology of mind” the kind of social, anti-intimistic psychotherapy they needed. Paraphrasing what Sartre said of Husserl, many Italian psychoanalysts can exclaim: “Bateson freed us of the inner world!”
It is also worth noting the popularity of group psychoanalysis in Italy, inspired by the experiences of W.R. Bion and S.H. Foulkes. Pioneers of group analysis were Fabrizio Napolitani (1925–1996) in Rome and his brother Diego Napolitani (1927–2013) in Milan.
The radical political commitment of the 1960s and 1970s had a great impact also on Italian psychoanalysis in that epoch. Among the psychoanalysts who worked most at the intersection of psychoanalysis and the social sphere, we should mention Sandro Gindro (1935–2002) in Rome – founder of the movement “Psicoanalisi contro” (Psychoanalysis Against) – and Enzo Morpurgo (1920–2002) in Milan.
The most meaningful figure of those roaring years was Elvio Fachinelli (1928–1989), a practicing analyst in Milan and member of the SPI (Italian Psychoanalytic Society),[7] although he was in dissent with its bureaucratic politics. I recall him here with special emotion because he was both my friend and one of my teachers. First co-editor of one of the most influential Marxist journals of the 60s, “Quaderni Piacentini,” he later founded the journal “L’Erba voglio” and then a publishing house by the same name. An, excellent writer, in the wake of W. Benjamin and T.W. Adorno, he published a series of articles and papers of social critique from a psychoanalytic perspective that impressed the 1970s and 80s audience, especially the young. He wished to make the psychoanalyst step out from the narrow and muffled universe of the psychoanalytic office to participate in the overall change in mentality: hence his participation in radical experiments of alternative pedagogy, of the creation of self-formation and self-consciousness groups, of anti-psychiatry. Diffident towards any hierarchical and institutional sclerosis, he refused Lacan’s proposal in 1973 to become president of the Italian equivalent of his Ecole Freudienne de Paris (Fachinelli was one of the first readers and promoters of Lacan’s writings in Italy): Fachinelli, whose spirit was essentially anarchic, did not believe that an institution, even if inspired by dissident thought, could promote psychoanalysis as an instrument of both political and personal emancipation and liberation.
4.
Italian analysts write very rarely in English, and few older analysts read it. However, analysts in every country generally tend to resist English as lingua franca: every analyst writes in the language in which he practices. This is not a marginal detail: the decline of psychoanalysis’ scientific prestige has to do with to its refusal to adhere to Anglophone standards. A CNR (National Scientific Council) colleague of mine once told me: “Psychoanalysis is evidently not a science; otherwise you analysts would write in today’s scientific tongue, English.” Psychoanalysis follows lines bound to each country’s specific language, history, and traditions, it does not speak Esperanto. Ultimately, different countries, different psychoanalysis. This is a sign of the fact that psychoanalysis today appears closer to literature, theater, and cinema, the arts and philosophy than to science.
As a result, every linguistic area ends up developing not only its local psychoanalysis, but also producing its own particular image of psychoanalysis. Until a few years ago, when I crossed a European border, I felt as though I was entering another psychoanalytic world. If I went to Britain, for example, I would deal essentially with Kleinian analysts and with so-called object relation approaches (Winnicott), while American approaches (Ego and Self Psychologies) were in fact non-existent. If I went to a Germanic country, I would find analysts whose link to American schools was very strong, for the simple reason that what today we call “American psychoanalysis” is in fact the heir of the colonization of German and Austrian analysts who emigrated to the US in the 1930s and 1940s and later, which is why German, Austrian, and American analysts feel part of the same psychoanalytic family. In France, on the other hand, American schools, without exception, are outright rejected: here Lacanism flourished, but also some autochthonous schools inspired by Klein and Winnicott, of by French thinkers (Jean Laplanche, André Green, Jean-Paul Racamier).
I was trained both in France and in Italy. Beyond the huge cultural differences between these two countries (in fact very far from each other), students in both countries were trained on this basic assumption: “Anna Freud completely misunderstood her father’s thought, American psychoanalysis has degenerated and betrayed the psychoanalytic spirit, it has been completely subjected to the American way of life. The true psychoanalysis is European…” If I was in France, one usually continued saying “…Sigmund Freud is the absolute Master and Lacan is His Prophet”; while in Italy it was “…Winnicott and Bion are psychoanalysis” (in Italy Kleinism and post-Kleinism ruled).
My impression is that in recent years a certain homogenization of the psychoanalytic field has taken place. In the sense that there is a “high” psychoanalysis, which has now become cross-national—in the trendy neighborhoods of New York, London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan… and Kyiv… the same language is spoken. It is an Esperanto that I would call postmodern that can be heard in all the major intellectual metropolises. And then there is a “low” psychoanalysis (here “high” and “low” are not my judgments, but sociological evaluations) more or less connected to national or even regional figures, trends, and fashions. In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was still young, this vertical division between elite psychotherapy and mass psychotherapy had not yet fully emerged within psychoanalysis and the practices inspired by it. But the numerical explosion of shrinks has largely contributed to this division.
5.
Psychoanalysis exploded in Italy in the 1970s, almost 30 years after its boom in the USA—which is why in the minds of many Italians it remains intimately bound to the visionary and rebellious era of leftist protests. Even today, it is mainly the leftist media that gives space to psychoanalysis, while right-wing culture seems to focus on science, and thus on cognitive sciences. In the 1980s the Marxist left became much weaker, with the simultaneous rise of liberalism. In this period a shrinking interest in psychoanalysis coincided with the rise of family psychotherapies, which I have already mentioned.
In recent years, however, there has been a new reversal: for about a decade, psychoanalysis has become fashionable again, driven by a resurgence of left-wing radicalism among intellectuals. Žižek and the Ljubljana school, the all-out attack on neoliberalism (Byung-Chul Han and Piketty), the rise of queer issues, the strong return of anarchist philosophical culture (particularly Deleuze): all of this reminds those of us who are older of the furor of the 1970s. A certain type of psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian, benefits from this new socio-political and philosophical radicalism. Despite the fact that neither Freud nor Lacan were communists, on the contrary!
In the meantime, in the 1990s, families with “designated patients” began to rebel against the assumption that they were responsible for all the psychic disorders of their “disorderly” members. Families with a “deranged” member refused to feel guilty. Today, organic psychiatry (psychopharmacology, genetic etiology of mental disorders) and cognitive psychotherapies lead the field. Interest in the neurosciences and biology is widespread among intellectuals. Since 2000, for example, a brilliant philosopher of biology, Telmo Pievani, has become increasingly influential. He started out as a proponent of complexity theory and systems theory.
What has dominated until recently is a conception of genetic super-determinism. Today, Italian newspapers promote the fact that scientists are about to identify the gene for all psychic and physical troubles: one is born autistic, hysteric, alcoholic, or unfaithful in love. This determinism carries with it a considerable secondary advantage: one can cease to feel guilty for the faults of one’s children, brothers, or sisters; “I am not to blame: the genome is.” However, my impression is that this genetic super-determinism is waning.
Nevertheless, the success of neurosciences, psychopharmacology, and genetics—to which today we must add AI—has not caused the number of people seeing a psychotherapist to diminish. The contrary seems to be true. Of course, classical psychoanalysis—with its long duration, expensiveness and 20th-century austerity—is more and more challenged by other psychotherapeutic techniques which promise short-term benefits and less rigid rules. For example, fewer and fewer analysts find patients willing to have more than two sessions a week, indeed many refuse to have more than one a week. But on the whole, in Italy the demand for a psychological cure, of spiritual counseling in a general sense, has increased. In Italian metropolises today—just as throughout the West—one can choose the type of psychotherapy one prefers or can afford. The psychotherapeutic market supply becomes ever larger and more varied, as in a big superstore. Thus the psychoanalyst can no longer exploit the power he enjoyed in the past owing to his rarity, or to his near monopoly on the “cure of the soul”: today it is the patient who dictates the rules, having become the rare commodity (due to the imbalance between supply and demand). Moreover, psychology departments continue to churn out many psychologists, nearly all of whom try to become psychotherapists: the psycho-market is starting to become saturated in Italy, at least in large cities.
Psychoanalysis still enjoys a certain prestige among the “soul cure shops,” not only because, being longer and more expensive, it is accessible to a wealthier and hence more prestigious clientele, but also because it is the least prescriptive therapy: psychoanalysis frees the analysand (a term that is replacing the old-fashioned patient, as the latter stinks of medicine and hospitals) to tell what s/he wants, and banishes any advice or prescriptions. Only those deeply imbued with the values of subjective autonomy can fully appreciate the exquisitely liberal psychoanalytic approach. The farther one steps down the socio-cultural ladder, the more one finds the need for an ever more active healer, rather than the too passive, relaxed, and hence useless, figure of the analyst. The less a therapy costs, the more the therapist is verbose, prescriptive, and interventionist. Unfortunately, we do not have any systematic sociological study on the psychoanalytic profession, partly due to its fragmentation into various groups. But a well-conducted sociological study would help us understand many aspects of the “unspoken” in psychoanalysis.
6.
It would however be a shortsighted overview if we tried to understand the state of the art of analysis in Italy without referring to the international framework.
The first psychoanalytic generation (approximately 1900–1938) spoke German. The second generation (roughly from WW2 until the mid-1960s) was mostly Anglophone: the hegemony of London and New York—albeit mutually alternative and incompatible—was unchallenged. The third generation (until the beginning of 1990s) marked a latinization of psychoanalysis: Paris, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, and even Milan, the capital of fashion and design, became the swinging capitals of psychoanalysis. This generation adored the French Lacan and Derrida, Bion in his Brazilian version and the Chicagoan Kohut.
It is still difficult to envision the fourth generation. However, the so-called “relational” trend is growing, especially in the United States. This trend derives its authority from the successful egalitarian narrative: the analyst and the analysand must be on the same level, and their relationship should not be asymmetrical. The increasing prestige of Jean Laplanche—first a student and then an opponent of Lacan—represents the most sophisticated face of this relational conversion of psychoanalysis.
Over the last years, in the West in general the figures of both the psychoanalyst and psychotherapist have changed. Today the psychoanalyst is less and less a medical doctor and more and more a psychologist or social worker, and more often a woman than a man. Lacan used to say that women are better analysts because they understand better than men how bizarre the human being is. This raises an anthropological question common to almost all so-called Western countries: why do women gravitate so heavily toward “shrink” professions? In today's American television shows “the psychologist” is often portrayed by an African American woman.
It has likely been this feminization that has pushed psychoanalysis to focus on primitive, “fusion” or “symbiotic” relationships between mother and child. In recent decades and especially in Anglo-American countries, feminism has influenced campuses and has largely become symbiotic with psychoanalysis. Feminist scholars in the US have brought psychoanalysis into the academic realm just as it was being expelled from medical and psychology faculties. Nowadays, cognitive sciences and attachment theory tend to prevail in these latter fields. Thus, it is primarily professors in Women’s Studies, History, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Queer Studies, and similar disciplines who are ensuring the transmission of the fundamentals of psychoanalysis to new generations. In Italy, Freud is studied in the final year of high school within the philosophy curriculum (the most prestigious Italian high schools—classical and scientific—include three years of history of philosophy), but he is studied less and less in psychology faculties. He is completely absent from psychiatry faculties. In short, the analyst is becoming an increasingly maternal figure rather than a paternal one: more spiritual-affective support and less therapeutic technique, more holding and care than treatment and cures. Hence the dominance of the term “empathy.” Many analysts, including IPA members, are convinced that what matters in analysis is empathy! “Empathy” is a conceptual pandemic. One must empathize with the patient, meaning that the patient must have the clear feeling that “the analyst suffers and enjoys with me, for me.” Today, one no longer says of someone “he is a good man, she is a good woman,” but rather “he is an empathetic person!” Empathy is considered the very foundation of ethics today. It is the reduction of the ethical dimension to subjective affectivity.
Furthermore, the therapist is less and less linked to a precise School or Association: s/he follows a very personalized training and increasingly practices in an eclectic and flexible way, a free-lancer not bound to strong institutions. This de-medicalization, social-workerization, feminization. and de-institutionalization of analysis—if you forgive me these terrible neologisms—have accompanied the hermeneutical trend in Italy, which has lasted until the year 2000 and beyond.
The hermeneutic or “narratological” re-interpretation of analysis rejects what Habermas called the “scientistic self-misunderstanding” of psychoanalysis: it brings it back to an existential activity of Bildung (formation), along the lines of the German Romantic tradition. This trend has become influential even among psychoanalysts, who adopt a hermeneutic, and mildly Heideggerian, slang to describe their practice. Psychoanalysts currently no longer interpret dreams, rather they now interpret “texts of dreams;” they no longer interpret slips of the tongue, but rather “slips of the discursive text”—everything is viewed in a linguistic and interpersonal perspective. Analysis is just a recounted story, no truer than other possible stories—only a happier story. Some don’t even call it psychoanalysis but “conversationalism”: analysis is a specific conversation technique. The term narrativa is gaining popularity in Italy, taken from the English narrative, as analysis now helps patients shift from an “unhappy narrative” to a happier one.
The rough Freudian language is largely dismissed by these post-Freudian psychoanalysts (also in Italy, the prefix “post” is generously used). The new keywords, heavily influenced by phenomenology and hermeneutics, are relation, comprehension, being-with, communication, relationship, intersubjectivity, dialogue, lived experience or Erlebnis, conversation, desire, Self, pietas. In addition to the omnipresent empathy. In this way, psychoanalysis tends to return to the domain of humanistic consolationes, and perhaps might qualify as an activity worthy of protection by the Minister of Cultural Affairs, like archaeological sites or folk dances and costumes. Psychoanalysis, a discipline always perched on the borderline between “scientific” and “humanistic” culture, is now shifting toward the humanistic, cultural side. Does this mean the failure of Freud’s project, who thought of psychoanalysis both as science and art, psychotherapy and creative reinterpretation, empirical practice and subjective metanoia? We may say that Lacan’s project seems to be achieved, as he aimed to radically separate psychoanalysis from psychology, also from a theoretical and scientific standpoint. This separation is visible at the higher levels. Fewer and fewer psychologists trained in our universities are familiar with Freud. “You still read Freud!” young psychologists say mockingly to their peers who aspire to become psychoanalysts.
7.
Also in Italy, psychoanalytic thought has influenced literary criticism, art criticism, cinema, art, and literature more than psychiatry or psychology. Scholars of comparative literature, deeply influenced by semiotics, structuralism and post-structuralism, Heideggerian phenomenology, deconstructionism, hermeneutics, and “negative thought,” have embraced Freudianism as one of their major paradigms. All of Freud’s main concepts—reinterpreted through Lacan, Barthes, Vattimo, Ricoeur, Derrida, Deleuze, Habermas, or Žižek—are intertwined with key terms in literary criticism, such as pleasure of the text, writing, difference and sexual difference, critique of the subject, dialectic of desire, desiring machines, textuality, and intertextuality, among others.
It is interesting that analysts from the SPI and AIPsi (the Italian associations that adhere to the International Psychoanalytic Association), generally seem quite distant from this “cultural psychoanalysis.” They tend to follow trends that, in fact, have not had any significant impact outside of the psychoanalytic circle. As we have mentioned, their primary reference point is Kleinianism, especially in the revised versions of H.A. Rosenfeld, D. Meltzer, and W.R. Bion. The latter, despite the often obscure and pontificating tone of his statements, became, for about twenty years, the undisputed paradigm of all psychoanalysis gravitating around SPI and AIPsi or deriving from them. Bion is more influential in Italy than in Britain. Only Winnicott enjoys comparable prestige within the Italian psychoanalytic establishment. Italian analysts trained under the SPI or AIPsi umbrella, until recently, looked to London as their capital, where the undisputed authority of the Kleinians is the Tavistock Clinic. However, just as Kleinianism never played a crucial role in British culture—psychoanalysis in general in Britain remained marginal compared to the cultural mainstream—similarly, the dominance of Kleinian thought, with its rather blunt language for a mindset attuned to philosophical nuances, has created a divide between the psychoanalytic circle and the broader Italian cultural scene. While SPI and AIPsi analysts view psychoanalysis through a Kleinian and Winnicottian lens, intellectuals interested in psychoanalysis tend to approach it from a post-structuralist, Lacanian perspective, or through the lens of chaos and complexity theories (e.g., G. Bateson, H. Maturana, F. Varela, E. Morin, etc.).
In recent years, however, certain American schools—which had been largely excluded from Italian psychoanalytic culture until about fifteen years ago—are gaining significant traction in Italy. This is a rather odd influence, given the deep crisis in American psychoanalysis. Specifically, there is growing interest in Heinz Kohut’s approach and the “relational” trend (Robert Stolorow, Stephen Mitchell, Owen Renik). Increasingly, psychoanalytic theory is gently drowning in the vast sea of empathy.
In truth, there are other analysts who don’t give up the ideal of scientific respectability, which is why they publish increasingly arid and concise articles in Standard Scientific English in the official journals (of course almost all in English), where they imitate the impersonal writing style typical of the international scientific community. This analytic literature betrays the real vocation of analytic “care,” which remains influenced by local idioms and mentalities, as we have already said. This—often more stylistic than substantial—pretension of being scientific derives from the analyst’s mistaken idea that s/he is the equivalent of what the economist or the sociologist are for society: someone who develops objective theories on human beings.
In fact, the analyst is rather analogous to a politician, that is, someone practical: the politician is successful not when s/he holds the true economic or sociological theory (even if one hopes s/he knows something about economy and sociology), but when s/he is able to establish the right transference with the people. When Freud said that analyzing is an impossible activity—as education and governance were for him[8]—he probably meant just that: the good analyst is not one who possesses a proved theory of the mind, but above all someone who is endowed (in analogy with jurisprudence) with psychoprudence. What is more important than theoretical and speculative abilities, is what Aristotle called phronesis, the prudentia of the Romans. A good analyst, even if s/he writes in English, is not one who knows, but a person who knows how to do things, who is prudent. Of course, like any politician, even the analyst is constantly exposed to the temptation of demagogy: to manipulate others by telling them just what they wish to hear.
8.
Two contemporary events in 1988–89—one in Italy and another in the US—were eloquent signs of change. In Italy, the Ossicini Law was passed, allowing also psychology graduates the right to use the title of psychotherapist, which had before then been reserved to graduates in medicine. This law basically recognized the increasing de-medicalization of psychotherapeutic activity—thus furnishing an institutional support to the hermeneutical vogue, which was the erudite alternative to the dominant scientism. In November 1988, a US court forced the American Psychoanalytic Association to allow also non-medical doctors to be trained and recognized as psychoanalysts (the APA had always accepted only MDs). This new legislation in the US and Italy acknowledged the fact that psychiatrists were increasingly abandoning the analytic practice.
The Ossicini Law stipulates that only psychiatrists and psychology graduates can legally practice psychotherapy. To be recognized by the state as psychotherapists, they must have completed at least four years of psychotherapy training, offered by universities or private institutions accredited by the state. In 2022, there were 278 private psychotherapy training schools recognized by the Ministry of Education, University and Research, with the capacity to graduate over 4,000 psychotherapists per year. Since the late 1980s, all Italian psychotherapists and psychoanalysts have been obsessed with achieving “recognition” for themselves or their students. Although psychoanalysis is not formally mentioned in the Ossicini Law, nearly all analytic schools have complied with state requirements, having their training programs recognized. They have all accepted the principle of admitting only graduates in medicine or psychology for training. In this way, a strong academicization of psychotherapy has replaced the colorful, wild, and chaotic galaxy of psychotherapies of the past. However, I wonder if the application of the Ossicini Law coincides with the decline of psychoanalysis in Italy around the turn of the 21st century merely by chance.
Today the typical Italian psychiatrist trains using the DSM (the Anglo-American diagnostic manual for globalized psychiatrists), prescribes pharmaceuticals, and leaves psychotherapy to psychologists and other socio-psycho-pedagogic figures, viewed as being less prestigious. The old psychoanalytic dream to acquire real respectability—by being accepted as a legitimate member in the exclusive club of Medical Science—is revealing itself to be only that, a dream. Today the analyst seems to say, like Groucho Marx, “I will never accept to become a member of a [scientific] club until it accepts me as one of its members!”
This mutation in the analysts’ social identity was paralleled by a mutation of the typical client. Today, the only ones who devotedly undertake a classical analysis—four to five 50-minute sessions a week for many years—are trainees. Analysis, beyond training, increasingly becomes a form of intermittent and discontinuous support for subjects who demand fast and concrete results, or who need help in “critical moments” of their lives. Of course, older analysts are nostalgic for the good old times when their numbers were few—and say that now barbarians triumph. But this is all a by-product of a change in subjectivity in the West.
The kind of transference on which 20th-century psychoanalysis was constituted—based on the illusion of the analyst as a “subject supposed to know”, as Lacan said—does not work as well. Analysts have lost the kind of authority they used to enjoy, and must gain the analysand’s consent in the field, in a context that is more flexible and less guaranteed. Analysts say that “today patients are better read, more disenchanted, and hence more defensive toward psychoanalysis.” They are “more defensive” because they believe less in the power of speech. The critique of the authority of this supposed knowledge, which psychoanalysis itself ironically contributed to spreading in the Western lifestyle, at a certain point turned against the very authority of psychoanalysis itself. Today, the transferal illusion and traditional interpretations are less persuasive. The analyst today has to invent new forms of ties or relations which can make 21st-century subjects permeable to the force of speech.
9.
In the 1970s, Lacan’s influence was very strong in Italy, although over the following decades it grew weaker. One of the reasons for this decline was the case of Verdiglione.
In the 1970s and 1980s Armando Verdiglione, who was analyzed by Lacan, created a cultural and entrepreneurial empire in Milan, the capital of Italian business. He launched an intensive series of multi-cultural activities which impressed Italy, at that time still somewhat provincial: huge international conferences held around the world (including Tokyo and New York), expensive journals, a very active publishing house, and a luxurious cultural foundation with the same name. This psychoanalytic yuppie promoted Lacanian psychoanalysis, anti-Marxist (especially anti-Communist Party) propaganda—at that epoch Italian culture was magnetized above all by the Communist party, dissolved later in 1989—and a special bond with the Parisian cultural scene (especially with post-structuralism and nouveaux philosophes). All this came to an end in 1986, when Verdiglione was arrested, tried and sentenced to jail for having taken advantage of some of his analysands and followers who had given him huge amounts of money, that he used to build his empire. That trial gave rise in Italy to many controversies and Verdiglione was considered, rightly or wrongly, the paradigm of the “bad analyst” who cheated his own patients by dragging them into megalomaniac enterprises, and who was involved with controversial politicians (it was rumored that he had analyzed Bettino Craxi, Italy’s prime minister for years, who died in exile in Tunisia). But Verdiglione basically failed for another reason: he was unable—but how many Italians did better than him?—to translate Parisian culture, French Theory, for an Italian audience. When you sell a new electronic gadget, you have to translate the instructions into the language of the country where you’re trying to sell it; if you don’t, people won’t be able to use it, and sooner or later, they’ll see you as a fraud. Verdiglione tried to sell the Lacan-machine without providing a real translation (not of the words, but of the way of thinking).
We mentioned that to implant itself in a country, psychoanalysis must be “translated” according to the linguistic and cultural lines prevailing in this country. Lacan’s—and other analysts’—genius was to adapt Freud’s thought, conceived in a Jewish and Viennese context dominated by positivism, to a more spiritual and Hegelian French culture and sensibility. Also the masters of US analytic schools, most of them Jews of German mother-tongue—from Kris and Reik to Kohut, from Hartmann, Loewenstein to Kernberg—were able to make their discipline compatible with the American Way of Thinking. The same argument is valid for other countries. Verdiglione, but also Italian analysts in general, have up until now been unsuccessful in “Italianizing” psychoanalysis, in making it enter into the blood and bones of the Italian way of thinking.
The situation changed after 2010, when a Lacanian psychoanalyst from Milan, Massimo Recalcati, became famous. Today he is prominent in the media and writes for La Repubblica, one of Italy’s most widely read newspapers, with a left-wing orientation. Of course, I had initially set out not to mention any living analysts, as is customary in such discussions, but for the sake of descriptive completeness, I have made an exception for Verdiglione and Recalcati. The fact is that, thanks to a general Lacan Renaissance, not only in Italy, Lacan has re-entered both the intellectual and psychoanalytic scene in Italy in a significant way.
In fact, it is interesting to note that Lacanians, in general, are better at popularizing psychoanalysis than analysts from other schools, with some even becoming media stars. In the Anglophone world, Lacanian analysts or philosophers like Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Darian Leader, and others have become intellectual celebrities.
One wonders why Lacan’s sophisticated and hermetic theory turned out to be surprisingly suited—like Jungian analysis—to popularization. In fact, a certain relative media success among Lacanians is only one aspect of Lacanian success among philosophers, writers, cultured journalists, and academics in the humanities, while in the US, the UK and even Italy, this Lacanian impact is much weaker among established psychoanalysts and doctors. Even in Italy, the split between analytic practice (today dispersed among a myriad of small and larger schools) and “cultural psychoanalysis,” where French post-structuralism prevails, seems to deepen. But perhaps this was the destiny of psychoanalysis itself. Already in 1923, Marco Levi-Bianchini (1875–1961), one of Freud’s earliest supporters in Italy, told his fellow Italian psychiatrists (who were—as today—very suspicious of psychoanalysis) that “psychoanalysis, thrown out the front door (psychiatry, neurology) will come through the back door (psychology, education and philosophy)”.[9] This warning, with some modification (art and feminism in place of psychology and education), holds also for Lacanism. Today in Italy Lacanism has been ejected from established psychoanalysis, but seems to return through the back door of Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, etc.
It must be said that for a few years now, psychoanalysis has come back “into fashion” in Italy, while in other countries—particularly in France—it is in decline. Lacanianism is also in fashion, as if we’ve gone back to the 1970s. Educated people are once again reading Freud. Some might say it’s just a trend, a wave that could fizzle out in a few years. What’s hard to predict is the future of psychoanalysis, not just in Italy—such a small fragment of the world—but globally. I believe psychoanalysis thrives when psychiatry and medical treatment are in crisis. Its fate, therefore, seems inversely linked to that of psychiatry. What is certain is that throughout the hyper-industrialized world, there is a growing demand for shrinks. “The psychologist” has increasingly become an institutional figure in schools, hospitals, factories, and in women’s health centers. It does not really matter which current, methodology, or type of psychology this shrink adheres to—what matters is that people can turn to her (as increasingly it is a “she”) just as they once turned to a spiritual advisor. Not long ago in Italy, this advisor was usually the priest, but also the philosophy teacher in secondary schools. Today, it can only be a “psychologist.” Psychoanalysts, however, benefit from this massive demand for spiritual guidance in an era of growing secularization only to a certain extent. Psychoanalysis remains an elite, metropolitan approach, often associated with what Italians call the “ZTL” milieu, meaning the people who live inside Limited Traffic Zones, the well-off historical and economic city centers. By “elite” I don’t necessarily mean an economic aristocracy, but rather a social class with a higher cultural level than average—people who, in contrast to the those “left behind,” I would call the “running ahead.” This social group is generally composed of individuals with a good education, younger people, more women than men, with rising economic status, who live in large urban centers, speak English, and lean more towards the left on the political spectrum. In other words, the fact that psychoanalysis remains somewhat of a niche practice shouldn’t be seen as a disadvantage, but rather as proof of its particular prestige. There is a social stratification in the consumption of psychotherapies, and psychoanalysis still occupies the top tier. This is similar to what happens in many other fields: professors who prepare students for doctoral studies are far fewer than those teaching in elementary and middle schools, precisely because they are more prestigious. Contrary to popular belief, the more prestigious an area becomes, the fewer people are part of it. Every psychoanalytic school or movement faces this “impossible” choice: either to expand quantitatively (training more and more analysts) or to focus on the highest quality (which makes it very selective). Achieving both is like trying to “have your cake and eat it too,” (in Italian we say “to have a full barrel and a drunk wife”).
On the other hand, the prestige of a school or institute—not just in psychoanalysis—does not depend so much on its selectivity, but rather on the type of student it attracts. Personally, I don’t believe that a specific psychoanalytic branch is inherently superior; it depends on who is drawn to it. If, for various reasons, the most serious, ambitious, and talented young people are attracted to a particular branch, it will naturally become the most prestigious, the “coolest.” I get the sense that today’s most promising young people are once again being drawn to Lacan and other “French schools,” (“again” with reference to the 1970s). By this, I mean that the brightest feminists, the most open-minded philosophers, the most sophisticated writers, the most perceptive popularizers, the least dogmatic queer activists or far-left militants, and the most innovative psychiatrists are increasingly drawn in that direction. In recent years, the wind has been blowing that way.
Further Reading:
Armando, L. A. (1989), Storia della psicoanalisi in Italia dal 1971 al 1996, Nuove Edizioni Romane, Roma.
Benvenuto, S. (1997), “A Glimpse at Psychoanalysis in Italy”, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, 5, pp. 33-50. http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number5/benvenuto.htm
Benvenuto, S. "Elvio Fachinelli's 'Excessive Joy'", European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Special 25th Anniversary Issue: Nr 15. 2021/1, 19 June 2021, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/elvio-fachinellis-excessive-joy/
Caligaris, C. (1975), “Petite histoire de la psychanalyse en Italie”, Critique, 333, pp. 175-195.
Canestrari, R. & Ricci Bitti, P. (1993), a cura, Freud e la ricerca psicologica, Il Mulino, Bologna.
Carloni, G. (1993), “La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana” in R. Canestrari & P. Ricci Bitti (1993), pp. 53-77.
Carotenuto, A. (1977), Jung e la cultura italiana (Roma: Astrolabio, 1977).
Conci, M. (1994), “Psychoanalysis in Italy: A Reappraisal”, Int. Forum of Psychoanalysis, 3, pp. 117-126.
David, M. (1982), “La psychanalyse en Italie”, in Jaccard (1982), vol. 2.
Ferro, A. (2017), Pensieri di uno psicoanalista irriverente, Raffaello Cortina, Milano.
Jaccard, R. (1982), Histoire de la psychanalyse, 2 voll, Hachette, Paris.
Musatti, C. (1976), “La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana”, Rivista di Psicoanalisi, 22, pp. 154-161.
Musatti, C. (1982), Mia sorella gemella la psicoanalisi, Editori Riuniti, Roma.
Nobécourt, J. (1983), “Freud et le ‘Triskeles’”, Critique, 435-6.
Nobécourt, J. (1983), “La transmission de la psychanalyse freudienne en Italie via Trieste”, Critique, 435-6, pp. 623-627.
Novelletto, A., Viola G.E., Rovigatti F. (1989), a cura, Italy in Psychoanalysis, Treccani, Roma.
Novelletto, A. (1992), “Italy” in P. Kutter, ed., Psychoanalysis International. Guide to Psychoanalysis throughout the World, Fromann-Holzbog, Stuttgart.
Novelletto, A. (1993), “Freud in Italia” in R. Canestrari & P. Ricci Bitti (1993), pp. 79-85.
Ranchetti, M. (1991), “Les Oeuvres complètes et l’édition des Opere di Sigmund Freud”, Revue Internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse, 4, pp. 331-355.
Recalcati, M. (2010), L’uomo senza inconscio. Figure della nuova clinica psicoanalitica, Raffaello Cortina, Milano.
Roazen, P. (2004), Edoardo Weiss. The House that Freud Built, Transactions Publ., New Brunswick-London.
Roudinesco, E., Plon M. (1997), Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, Fayard, Paris; specialmente le voci: F. Basaglia (p. 92), V. Benussi (p. 103), E. Fachinelli (p. 281), F. Fornari (p. 316), E. Gaddini (p. 371), Italie (p. 524), M. Levi-Bianchini (p. 621), I. Matte-Blanco (p. 658), M. Montessori (p. 692), C. Musatti (p. 701), N. Perrotti (p. 788), E. Servadio (p. 969), E. Weiss (p. 1089).
Servadio, E. (1965), “La psicoanalisi in Italia. Cenno storico”, Rivista di psicoanalisi, 11.
Vegetti Finzi, S. (1986) Storia della psicoanalisi, Mondadori, Milano.
Voghera, G. (1980), Gli anni della psicoanalisi, Edizioni Studio Tesi, Pordenone.
Bibliography
David, M. (1990), La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino.
Freud, S. (1937), “Analisi terminabile e interminabile”, SE, 23, pp. 216-252.
Levi-Bianchini, M. (1923-24), “Difesa della psicoanalisi”, Arch. Gen. Neurol. Psichiat., 5.
Matte Blanco, I. (1998), The Unconscious as Infinite Set, revised ed., Karnak, London.
Notes
[1] See Matto Blanco, 1973.
[2] See Weiss, 1952, 1964, 1991, 1995.
[3] See Gaddini, 1992
[4] Even if all the founders, in 1932, of the first Italian Psychoanalytic Society were Jews, except Nicola Perrotti (1897–1970). Among the founders we find Weiss, Cesare Musatti (1897–1989), Marco Levi Bianchini, Emilio Servadio (1904–1995).
[5] Today instead of the psychiatric hospitals we have “family-homes”: few patients (often not more than five) live in private apartments, where they are followed by clinical social workers and psychiatrists.
[6] In the Italian Parliament and in the Italian delegation at the Strasburg’s European Congress we count a large number of philosophers. Professors in philosophy have been mayors of important cities (like Massimo Cacciari in Venice), ministers, leaders of important political parties (like the super-catholic Rocco Buttiglione), and a professor of philosophy-Marcello Pera-is the president of the Italian Senate (the “second citizen” of the country after the president of the Republic).
[7] See Fachinelli, 1972, 1974, 1989.
[8] Freud, 1937, p. 148.
[9] Levi-Bianchini, 1923–24, p.13.
Bio
Sergio Benvenuto is a researcher in psychology and philosophy at the National Research Council (CNR) in Rome and a psychoanalyst. He is an editor of the European Journal of Psychoanalysis and a member of the Editorial Board of American Imago and Psychoanalytic Discourse (PSYAD). He teaches psychoanalysis at the International Institute of Psychology of the Deep in Kiev and at the Esculapio Specialization in Psychotherapy in Naples. He has been or is a contributor to cultural and scientific journals such as Lettre Internationale, L ’évolution psychiatrique, DIVISION / Review.
Publication Date
September 20, 2024