This column attempts to explore the lives and work of IAPSP members from different parts of the world. In this eighth interview of the series, I am pleased to dialogue with Ingrid Pedroni from Rome, Italy. Ingrid has been President of ISIPSé School of psychoanalytic psychotherapy (Instituto e Scuola di Specializzaziome in Psicologia del Sé e Psicoanalisi Relzionale) for five years. She is now Faculty member and supervisor analyst at the same institute. She is also in private practice as a psychoanalyst, family and couple therapist. In this interview with her we will hopefully find out more about her experience as a self-psychologically informed therapist working in Rome.

Interview with Ingrid Pedroni

Annette: Hello Ingrid! Thank you for graciously accepting my invitation to be interviewed for this eForum column. I am curious to know more about you, your life and work in Rome, a beautiful city which I have had the pleasure to visit some time ago. First of all, can you tell me when and how you became interested in Self Psychology?

Ingrid: First of all, I must say how honored and grateful I feel to you Annette for having chosen me for this interview, giving me the opportunity to consider my experience within the Italian and international community of Self Psychology. I started my training as psychotherapist rather late in my life, my first Ph.D. had been law, and I had focused my post-graduate studies in economics. I had always been interested in psychology and philosophy but had never considered those interests as the starting point of a profession. It was through my personal experience as a patient that I began to think that psychoanalysis might become my professional engagement.

I was in my twenties when I started my first analysis with a Jungian analyst who was born in New York but had lived in Italy since her marriage. In many ways, she became a model for me, as, like me, she belonged to two worlds, the Southern Mediterranean and the Northern of the U.S that she had harmoniously integrated. She had started her profession in her forties, and I thought that like her I could plan to become a psychoanalyst in the second part of my life. This long-term planning became more urgent when my analyst suddenly died; it was unexpected and traumatic, the first of many painful bereavements. After some time, I decided to start a new analysis. I did not look for a substitute, so I chose to compare my Jungian experience with a Freudian one also in view of a possible future training. My encounter with Kohut’s thinking took place as a consequence of these two analyses, the first a very successful one and the second a rather frustrating, orthodox Kleinian treatment, which, nevertheless, taught me clearly how I would not like to carry on a therapeutic process. When I read “The Restoration of the Self “, I discovered what I had been looking for as a clinical and theoretical framework. In the crucial role assigned to the Self as the guiding principle of psychological life I sensed the echo of my innermost need, which resonated with my Jungian experience. From the clinical point of view, the outright rejection of a classical stance based on transference interpretations, the introduction of an empathic listening to the patient’s mirroring longings was the exact reversal of what I had experienced in my second analysis: an excruciating reduction of my emotional life to an ongoing mirroring of the analyst in the transference. In some of Kohut’s cases as in his outline of developmental stages, I saw the answer to what I had implicitly longed for, the reconciliation with my father and his original world and the internal representation I had of him.

Annette: It is so moving how you, as many others I interviewed, and as for myself, have recognized in Kohut’s writing what you longed for from an Other. Nevertheless, it must have required a lot of courage to change profession at mid-life like you did. What a journey! Can you tell us some of the steps you followed then?

Ingrid: Kohut’s Restoration of the self was the starting point of my Ph.D. final paper that I intended as a comparison between Kohut’s Self Psychology and Jung Analytical Psychology. However, before making this second step on my path to Self Psychology, I had to face the academic hostility towards the issue I was proposing. Some well-known professors reacted as if comparing a psychoanalytic author with Jung would be something equivalent to anathema. Again, this disquieting experience marked a significant development in my orientation: I wanted to learn how different schools could contribute to widen the conceptual and clinical scope of a therapeutic endeavor instead of constantly reasserting their prevalence over all other models.

The other outcome of my tormented quest for someone who could guide my exploration was of paramount importance for my present and future engagement. Leaving aside the academic establishment, I contacted Professor Franco Paparo who had translated Kohut’s books in Italian and was the most eminent representative of Self Psychology in Italy. He fully endorsed my project, Among the books he suggested, was a volume of Progress in Self Psychology “Comparisons and Contrasts” dedicated to my favorite topic, the analysis of the multifaceted connections of Kohut‘s thinking not only with Jung but also with many other psychological and philosophical schools. Professor Paparo’s generous encouragement supported me in such a way that my research became an enthusiastic exploration of what I believed from then on should become my guiding principles in facing the analytic venture. First of all, a phenomenological frame of mind, contrasting with an “objectivist “scientific paradigm in favor of a hermeneutic search for meaning, not in view of an ultimate truth but with the aim of achieving psychological health (Jung, 1921, Kohut 1977).

At the time, there was no recognized psychotherapeutic training in Self Psychology in Italy, and I could not leave my adolescent son. So, with Kohut’s thinking firmly inscribed in my background, I started my training in family therapy, a personal and professional experience of great value. It showed me the power of the field and the coming to the fore of intersubjective phenomena in the interactions of families we saw in treatment. In general, my appraisal of that training experience filtered through self-psychological notions such as the acknowledgement and enhancement of individual and family resources and the attention to the developmental opportunities of each member of the family: the leading edge of any therapeutic process. Yet in the treatment of couples or even individual members, I did not like to employ the technical protocols that rigidly configured the unfolding of the sessions. I usually perceived them as devoid of empathic resonance and spontaneous commitment.

As my third step towards Self Psychology, I wanted to learn how to work analytically with individual patients and felt the need of personal supervision that could guide my therapeutic interactions. I started training at the Neuropsychiatric Institute of Rome University in the Department for the psychoanalytic treatment of children and adolescents. My supervisor was a Jungian analyst who wanted me to act with my very young patient, diagnosed with a less than normal IQ, according to the principles of orthodox psychoanalysis. She insisted that I should interpret the images he built on the sand as resistances towards his ambivalent instinctual feelings for his mother. I did not follow her suggestions just played with him in a way that enabled him to express himself and come into being; after three months his IQ test showed a normal level. Again, an unsatisfying experience convinced me that only in a self-psychological framework I could find an adequate training.

The opportunity finally came when, having acquired my licence as therapist, I could start my psychoanalytic training at Isipsé with the feeling that I had finally reached my destination, and would tie together the different threads of my diverse and rather eclectic experience. Franco Paparo, who had become a good friend of mine, was my first supervisor in a case that was at the same time difficult and extraordinary. With Franco’s supervision, I lost the residues of some traditional attitudes that I had acquired in my diversified experience especially at the Neuropsychiatric Institute. My other supervisor, Gianni Nebbiosi helped me in overcoming my cherished systemic approach that in some instances interfered with the empathic understanding needed by a traumatized, and as he used to say ironically, traumatising person. My patient was a young mother of two children, whose marriage had been very difficult because of her husband’s dependence on a despotic father. I felt that in her marriage she was assuming the same domineering and devaluing attitude of her father in law. Gianni helped me see that she and only she was my patient and that I should regain the inner emotional inclination that would make her feel there was a witness to her past and present sufferings. In time, feeling understood, she could become empathic also with her husband, as Donna Orange, one of our visiting professors, was teaching us.

Besides those, essential supervising experiences, the training at the Institute featured a whole range of scientific meetings with many outstanding authors of Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis, among others, Lichtenberg, Lachmann and Fosshage. As I started participating in the annual conferences abroad, I began to feel part of the International community. The first occasion had been the Conference in Dreieich in Germany where I made the acquaintance of the German group of Self psychologists and of authors, like Ernst Wolf, who especially struck me for his moving report of his life in Germany and flight to the U.S. so similar to the story of my own family in those years. Then came the succeeding experiences in the U.S and around the world. For me and my Italian group, those in our part of the globe were especially stimulating, particularly in Jerusalem and in Vienna. The strength of Self Psychology reverberated over a very complex, dramatic context in the first and over the historic time span in the other. In both occasions, I felt deeply grateful to their organizers.

Annette: Dear Ingrid, you have been through a real obstacle course in pursuing what you wanted as a theoretical and clinical psychoanalytic stance. Now that you feel you’ve found your professional home at ISIPSé and in IAPSP, even having been teaching, and president of ISIPSé School for Psychotherapy for 5 years, can you tell us how Self Psychology teachings are presently received in Italy? How is ISIPSé doing as a Psychoanalytic Institute and School for Psychotherapy?

Ingrid: Since the nineties, ISIPSé scientific effort in organizing conferences and inviting outstanding representatives and authors had a significant resonance in Rome and Milan, while the psychoanalytic training at the Institute had taught us how to translate Kohut’s vision into our understanding of patients. Nevertheless, only a few psychoanalysts in Italy accepted the implications of Self Psychology in its innovative version of 1977 in Restoration of the Self. For the official psychoanalytic realm, the self as the dominant psychic motivation and his reduction of drives to secondary products of experiential fragmentation, was too great a reversal of orthodoxy. Perhaps, more generally, the psychoanalytic milieu remained apparently and officially linked to tradition more for political opportunities or even for affiliation and belonging needs than for deep convictions: Winnicott and Bion had indeed been extremely influential authors among Italian psychoanalysts.

The implementation of the Isipsé School for Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis, of which I was a president for 5 years, was the outcome of the enthusiastic adherence of those who, like me, being already active as psychotherapists, had received their training in Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis at ISIPSé Institute. We all wished to widen the number of therapists who could encounter this new conception of a psychoanalytic treatment and learn how to practice it. The development of the didactic program and the implementation of the school originated from a fervent, collective effort. It also reflected the predominant vision of our group that the greatest number of colleagues would grow through a teaching experience and in bringing the contribution of their specific knowledge to the School curriculum. The major teachings were Kohut’s and post Kohut’s Self Psychology, Lichtenberg’s theoretical and clinical contributions, Intersubjectivity, Relational Psychoanalysis, Attachment Theory and its development. Besides those basic tuitions, we all agreed about the benefit of integrating many clinical Seminars that would outline the diversity and complexity of the therapeutic endeavor in a variety of settings, such as group and family therapy, transcultural psychotherapy etc. but also the subtle nuances of the most frequent clinical paradigms such as transference and countertransference or authenticity.

Another major feature of our School program, partly reflected in those diverse and numerous teachings, was the innovative conception of the supervising activity. The empathic listening characteristic of our attitude towards patients had parallel guidelines in the way we accompanied our candidates in their first clinical experiences so that, according to their individual sensibilities, they could find their personal equation combining the different theoretical and clinical models. Many in our group had had unsatisfying experience of supervision, so we knew how essential it was to help them sustain the role of therapists, as many rigidities and loss of human connections can derive from implicit defenses against feelings of personal uncertainty.

It was a big challenge that brought an increasing number of graduates, usually young post-graduate psychologists, to apply for training and, having completed the four-year course, continued at the Institute to become members of ISIPSé. After some time, Milan opened a second branch of the School and developed a very interesting cooperation with Milan University of Bicocca. In these almost 15 years of activity the number of psychotherapists that work according to Self Psychology and Relational models has increased considerably and has spread from Rome to Naples and Florence in the center and from Milan to Turin in the North.

However, the most significant and rewarding result, has been the validation of the teaching and supervising efforts of our group through the way our candidates have absorbed a contemporary view of the therapeutic intervention. The clinical reports for the final examinations were of outstanding quality in reflecting deep personal engagement and capability of empathic listening and authentic exchange with patients, for the majority from Public Services who were very often more challenging than the ones from private practice. In these almost fifteen years, I have taught Kohut‘s major works to candidates of the first two years, and in the last three years, the major post-Kohut Self Psychology authors. In the different examination sessions we have at the end of each year and in supervision, I have often observed the recurrent ability of our candidates to combine these diverse models. I have considered it as an index of a convincing integration effort we had achieved as faculty members, supervisors and clinicians. In the candidates’ reports, the overall description of the patients’ conditions mentions mainly Self Psychological and Intersubjectivity constructs, like selfobjects needs, vulnerability, developmental failures. While in reporting some clinical situations or specific developments of the therapeutic process, references to Relational authors, like Mitchell, Bromberg and Donnel Stern are more frequent. To this extent, the objective of ISIPSé Institute and School to overcome the asperity that marked some of the debates between Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis has certainly been achieved contributing to the “Blurring of boundaries” (Teicholz) in the Italian milieu of contemporary psychoanalysis.

Annette: As we draw this conversation to a close, your last reply prompts me to ask you if, from your own experience of integrating Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis, you believe Self Psychology is still a growing and vitalizing field of psychoanalytic knowledge?

Ingrid: I absolutely believe that this is so and that the vitalizing effect of decades in listening, debating, confronting our respective clinical attitudes and theoretical conceptions has made Self Psychology, but also Relational Psychoanalysis, more complex, opened and enriched. I think that developments like Bacal’s optimal responsiveness and specificity theory have significantly widened the empathic stance of Self Psychology and have made it more flexible and unconstrained. In one of our conferences in Rome, Hazel Ipp said that Relational Psychoanalysis had taught her how to feel free in the interchange with patients. I think that this freedom and breadth is what Self Psychology has achieved in the last decades. I was struck by the comparison of Steven Stern’s book “Needed Relationships and Psychoanalytic Healing” to Grossmark’s “The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst” , because in some paradoxical way it seemed that they had changed roles, Grossmark reflecting mostly the essential paradigms of Self Psychology, while Stern considered a whole range of possible responsiveness depending on the patients’ different needs. There is no doubt that this cross-fertilization has brought an increase in the capacity of each brand of psychoanalysis to capture the nuances of the patients’ needs and longings and how to creatively respond to them. Furthermore, a highly significant feature of Self Psychology today is the strong commitment to ethical, political, philosophical issues that have been an outstanding characteristic of the last Conferences and of some very involving web discussions. For me it is an essential guiding contribution to this Community’s sense of collective Self and to the training of young professionals.
I feel deeply grateful, dear Annette, for this precious opportunity you have given me to speak about my experience which I consider a great privilege.

Annette: The feeling is mutual Ingrid. I am grateful for your generous and thoughtful answers to my queries. This has been a very interesting experience for me. I now know more about your own professional development and environment in Italy and about ISIPSé which I knew only by name up to now. We haven’t talked about the political reality in your part of the world, but I know enough to guess that you are going through much of the same struggles and alarms we have in America. I wish you and your Italian community the best for the years to come.