Harry Stack Sullivan and Stephen Mitchell in Italy – A historical and a personal account

Abstract

Having introduced readers to the history of the reception of psychoanalysis in Italy, the author reconstructs the history of the Italian reception of the work of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949) and Stephen A. Mitchell (1946–2000). Sullivan’s work played a fundamental role in adding to the “new Italian psychiatry,” founded by Franco Basaglia (1824–1980), the psychodynamic dimension it lacked, creating a new convergence between the social and psychological dimensions of psychiatry. Mitchell’s work played a fundamental role in the development of the Italian tradition of psychoanalytic psychotherapy originally articulated by Gaetano Benedetti (1920–2013) and Pier Francesco Galli, following their reception of Sullivan’s work. This phenomenon coincided, from an institutional point of view, with the emergence of a network of Italian institutes and societies affiliated to the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies, which had been originally cofounded by the William Alanson White Institute – the institute founded by Sullivan in 1943, where Mitchell himself trained as a psychoanalyst at the end of the 1970s. Interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis also ended up finding a place in the work of several colleagues of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, as well as allowing the foundation of several institutes and societies affiliated to the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. The author reconstructs this chapter of Italian psychoanalysis from both a historiographical and a personal point of view.