Trauma of Human agency and the impact of Giovanni Liotti's work on its theorisation

In presenting this brief account of my fi rst encounter with Giovanni Liotti I wish also to explain the human and scientifi c motivations which led me to ask for his consensus in my work – the product of years of literary and psychoanalytical research, followed by training in clinical psychology and psychoanalytic psychotherapy focusing above all on trauma. I reconstruct the fundamental moments of Liotti’s work on disorganized attachment and the tendency towards vulnerability to dissociation; the distinction between trauma infl icted by human agency and trauma caused by natural catastrophies; the need to intervene in the dyad caregiver-child as early as possible; the fundamental fragmentation between body and mind which dissociation involves and the predisposition [of victims of childhood trauma] towards dissociative disturbances and severe pathologies of the personality such as borderline disorders. Liotti’s belief in the real as opposed to imaginary nature of the trauma experienced is close to my own idea on this point and is in line with contemporary research that restores reality to the historical event and acknowledges its repercussion on neurobiology and intergenerational transmission (due to the dynamics of attachment that are reactivated between parents and child) as well as the nucleus of destructiveness in this chain of individual and social violence. Liotti distanced himself from the idea of trauma as something imagined that had so characterised Freudian psychoanalysis, reaffi rming instead the work of Pierre Janet (whom he had studied very closely) and Ferenczi (whose work I reintroduced in my fi rst international publications and wanted to discuss with him). I conclude describing our last correspondences that centered on literature and the pains of life.