Dina Vallino’s life and work

Born in Cagliari to a Sardinian mother and a father from Piedmont. At the age of two she fell ill with malaria and had difficulty regularly attending the first years of elementary school. Second-born Fiorenza arrived when she was seven years old. The first trauma in her life was, at age 12, the separation from her father, who was forced to move away because of conflicts with his wife’s family and live first in Rome and then in Milan.

She earned a classical high school diploma, obtaining the highest grade, then she was not allowed by her family to attend Medicine (she wished to become a pediatrician), but the Faculty of Philosophy. She therefore went to Milan in 1960, reuniting with her father. At twenty-two she married fellow university student Marco Macciò and they had, before graduation, their son Stefano.

She became a student of the phenomenologist Enzo Paci, to whom she expressed her intention to become a psychoanalyst, but he advised against it.

During the 1960s her training took place on the one hand as a self-taught student through studies in psychoanalysis and on the other at the University focusing on the phenomenology of Husserl and the existentialists. She studied all of Freud’s books and became acquainted with Melanie Klein’s thought through Franco Fornari’s book The Original Affective Life of the Child, published in 1963. She also read in those years with great interest Spitz’s The First Year of the Child and Sechehaye’s The Diary of a Schizophrenic. Through Merleau-Ponty she came to know the phenomenological psychiatry of Minkowski and Binswanger and the Gestaltistic psychiatry of Goldstein.

In 1967 she enrolled in the School of Specialization in Psychology, directed by Cesa Bianchi and Cesare Musatti, and began her first internships with Mariolina Berrini and Bona Oxilia and in 1969 with Zapparoli at the Affori Psychiatric Hospital. During her specialization she began working in Sondrio and later in Bergamo at “Il Centro medicopsicopedagogico”. She did clinical consultation and brief psychotherapy work; she was a psychologist in schools and counseled teachers and parents. Two days a week she went to Sondrio where she met children with even very severe mental retardation, caused by organic disease or by affective and environmental deprivation, Down children and orphans. She began to realize that the testing parameters were not adequate for these children and that they needed to be introduced, before testing, to play. Thus, she began each interview with the game of landscape, family, and animals, thanks to a large box that the Sondrio Center had on hand.

This extensive clinical experience was the main topic of her Postgraduate Thesis, discussed in 1970 together with Anna Ferruta, hinging on the problem of how a child’s emotions and his cognitive abilities condition each other. An element of great novelty present in the Thesis lay in the fact that the authors not only drew on Kleinian theory, which was beginning to be practiced in Italy in those years, but, anticipating the times, also on some of Bion’s theses, then completely absent instead from the Italian psychoanalytic debate. From 1992 she held a study group on Bion in Milan for 15 years, and in the 1990s she asked for supervision from Bion’s daughter Parthenope, who would remain her lifelong intimate friend until her tragic end.

In 1969 she began a personal analysis, which later became didactic, with Lina Generali, who, trained in London. When she finished the didactic analysis, she was accepted in 1974 as a candidate in the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and began her training with the society’s analysts: Anna Corti and Pierandrea Lussana in Rome and later in Milan Giuseppe Di Chiara, Mauro Morra and Luciana Nissim. To deepen her training she chose, outside the official SPI training, to receive supervisions in London for three years (1975-1978) from Kleinian analysts: Hanna Segal, Ruth Riesenberg, Betty Joseph, Martha Harris, Edna Oshaughnessy.

She approached to Infant Observation, which Lina Generali began teaching in Milan in 1978. Vallino was immediately convinced of the importance of this observational practice for the training of psychoanalysts and therefore began an infant observation. She was the first, besides Anna Motta, to be practiced in Italy. In 1978 at the Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi an infant observation group, led by Lina Generali and with the occasional participation of Harris and Meltzer, was born. This group was enthusiastically attended by a large group of psychoanalysts from northern Italy.

In the meantime, Dina Vallino engaged in an intensely clinical activity. Since the early 1970s, she accepted extremely problematic clinical cases. The excellent results she achieved led in the 1980s to consolidate her reputation as a therapist with exceptional gifts.

After her parent’s death, Dina Vallino was hospitalized for a serious autoimmune disease that appeared for the first time in 1975 and then tormented her periodically over the next forty.

From the late 1970s, for 20 years, Dina Vallino participated in the activities of the Milan Center for Psychoanalysis. Since 1978 she has been a teacher in Infant Observation (according to Esther Bick’s method), first at the Tavistock Course in Milan and then at the Advanced Course in Child Psychoanalysis of the Milan Center for Psychoanalysis. Privately for thirty years she led Infant Observation Groups.

Since 1980, Dina Vallino has led training and professional training courses for child care professionals in several University Institutes of Infant Neuropsychiatry and in numerous local health authorities of the Northern Italy.

Between 1985 and 1987 she joined a small child analysis study group with Antonino Ferro, Claudia Artoni, Maria Pagliarani, Giuliana Boccardi, in which they supervised each other. From the group in 1993 was founded the Observatory of Psychoanalysis of Children and Adolescents of CMP, also promoted by Marta Badoni.

In the 1990s Dina Vallino started an intellectual partnership with Franco Borgogno.

She has published 70 essays in Italian and foreign journals and in collected volumes, most notably Shared experience. The psychoanalytic dialogue (Karnac Books, London-New York 1992) (L’esperienza condivisa. Saggi sulla relazione psicoanalitica, Cortina, Milan 1992) (edited by Luciana Nissim and Andreina Robutti), a book that made known abroad the presence in Italy of an original psychoanalytic current.

In 1999 her book Raccontami una storia (Borla 1998; Mimesis 2019) won the Gradiva prize for the best Italian psychoanalysis book. Dina Vallino proposes to the child in analysis to build a story together with her; this helps him to think of himself through the imaginary characters of the story.

 Later, Dina Vallino (with Marco Macciò) started to study the infant observation protocols of dozens of different children in order to carry out an Observational Research on the development of the infant’s personality within the framework of the family relationship. And so it was that they reformulate the psychoanalytic idea of postnatal fusionality and to highlight the importance, already in the infant, of the desire to exist for the mother (cf. D. Vallino, M. Macciò, Essere neonati. Osservazioni psicoanalitiche, Borla 2004, Special Jury Award of the 2005 Gradiva Prize).

In Fare psicoanalisi con Genitori e bambini (Borla 2009) Dina Vallino proposes a participated consultation, which involves sessions in which child’s parents are present, involved in game activities and then invited to reflect on their own misunderstandings. This setting has long been pioneered within the Italian National Health Service by professionals trained by her.

 In 2011 and 2012, two issues (63 and 65) of the Quaderni di psicoterapia infantile (edited by Dina Vallino and Marco Macciò) dedicated to the theme of “Families in Participated Consultation” were published, with contributions by: Adriana Anderloni. Elisa Accornero, Paola Bertone, Claudia Beschi, Luisa Cherubin, Cinzia Chiappini, Silvia Lepore, Enrico Levis, Giovanna Maggioni, Giada Mariani, Elena Scarabello, Giorgio Rossi, Dana Scotto di Fasano, Luisa Scuratti, Manuela Trinci, Elena Trombini, Barbara Valli.

One year after her passing, in 2015, the Milan Center for Psychoanalysis organized a Study Day on Dina Vallino’s thought, attended by more than 300 people. Reading Italian Psychoanalysts (Karnac Books 2014), a volume presenting the history of Italian psychoanalysis through its representatives, publishes Dina Vallino’s 1992 essay, cited above.

 Franco Borgogno and Giovanna Maggioni edited the volume Una mente a più voci. Sulla vita e sulle opere di Dina Vallino, Mimesis Edizioni, Milan 2017. The book includes contributions presented during the Study Day dedicated to Dina Vallino, organized by Centro Milanese di Psicoanalisi in Milan on November 14, 2015.

Credits : Marco Macciò 2018