Farewell to a Great Gestalt Psychologist Anna Arfelli Galli 1933-2019

Abstract

Galli passed away on May 1 this year. With her death, the international scientific community loses an uncommonly committed, versatile, and open-minded personality in research and teaching in developmental psychology and educational psychology. With her death, the Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications lose a lovable colleague and supporter, one of its honorary members, one of the most important representatives of Gestalt theory in Italy. Anna Arfelli was born in Ravenna on September 9 th , 1933. During her school years, she had already got to know and love Giuseppe Galli, with whom she should be connected in a lifelong partnership in personal and scientific life. In 1957, she earned her doctorate summa cum laude in Medicine and Surgery at the University of Bologna. Her dissertation was already dedicated to a developmental psychological topic, "The reaction of the infant's smiling." The supervisor of this dissertation was Professor Renzo Canestrari, known as the founder of the Bologna School of Gestalt Psychology, who familiarized her (as well as her husband Giuseppe Galli and others) with Gestalt psychology. In 1960, she completed her specialist training in Medicine in what were then known as "nervous and mental diseases" with a dissertation on behavioral disorders in adolescence. This was followed by several years of intensive clinical and GESTALT THEORY,