Tradizioni o 'feconde' contraddizioni? Aspetti della clinica psichiatrica nel carteggio Freud-Binswanger.

The thirty-year correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Binswanger allows a new light to be shed on some specific physical therapeutic modalities (electrotherapy, hydrotherapy, chemical and pharmacological therapy), repeatedly implemented at the Binswanger family-owned Bellevue clinic in Kreuzlingen, and extensively (and surprisingly) encouraged by Freud himself. As such, this correspondence, recently translated into Italian, reveals an essential part of the history of psychiatry of the early 20th century, which includes the biographies of both the authors and their respectful friendship. In this context, the attentive comparison of some emblematic and complicated clinical cases, conducted by Binswanger and Freud especially in the first decade of the 20th century, can only testify (and thus confirm) their mutual recognition – precisely at the clinical level – of the real possibility of an alternation or an integration between hospital admission (with very often invasive methods of therapy) and psychoanalytic treatment