ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Italian law as a starting point for some crucial questions about the role of state regulation. It explains in a moment—between academic training in psychology and professional and extra-academic training in psychotherapy. In Italy, the law that instituted the State regulation of psychology and psychotherapy, which, in this country, form a single profession, was introduced in 1989. Private schools emerge from the panorama of prestigious associations—psychoanalytic, as well as psychotherapeutic of different orientations—that, in Italy, from the 1940s onwards, had trained the first and second generation of psychotherapists, the epigones of the great schools. Many of these psychotherapists and psychoanalysts arrived via the most diverse routes, often taking up psychotherapy or psychoanalysis in their middle age, starting from academic and non-academic professions and formations very distant and different from one another. In some ways, until the 1980s, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis were more or less undistinguished, and were even considered one and the same thing.
