Giuseppe Maffei: Anomaly or elaboration of a Italian Jungian thought?

The author presents the work of Giuseppe Maffei, a Jungian analyst who recently died. Maffei was active in training and supervising analysts, as well as creating cultural links and exchanges. He made an important contribution to the development of analytical psychology in Italy. The profile of the analyst is situated within the historical context and particularities of the Jungian movement in Italy. The relations between analytical psychology and psychoanalysis, marked by the pluralism found in Jung’s conceptions, form the background. Maffei’s interpretation of Jung was strongly rooted in the clinics of psychosis and was notably free of any academic or hypostatized approach. It featured a constant dialogue with Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis, without ever aligning with it. The purpose of any “knowledge” was to encounter the psychological reality of the other, in a profoundly Jungian way.