Cosimo Schinaia is a psychiatrist and training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI, Societa Psicoanalitica Italiana) and full member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). He has written numerous scientific articles in national and international psychoanalytical and psychiatric journals and academic papers in collective works. In 1997 he published the book Dal Manicomio alla Città. “L’Altro Presepe” di Cogoleto (From the Psychiatric Hospital to the City. The “Other” Nativity in Cogoleto) (Laterza, Rome-Bari); in 1998 Il Cantiere delle Idee (The Place in which Ideas are Built) (La Clessidra, Genoa); in 2001 Pedofilia Pedofilie. La Psicoanalisi e il Mondo del Pedofilo (Bollati Boringhieri, Turin) translated into English (On Paedophilia, Karnac, London, 2010), Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, French and German; in 2014  Il Dentro e il Fuori. Psicoanalisi e Architettura  (Il Melangolo, Genoa) translated into English (Psychoanalysis and Architecture. The Inside and the Outside, Karnac, London, 2016) and in 2016 Interno Esterno.Sguardi Psicoanalitici su Architettura e Urbanistica (Internal External.Psycohanalytic Looks to Architecture and City Planning) (Alpes Italia, Rome),translated into Spanish (Editorial Biebel, Buenos Aires, 2019); in 2019 Pedofilia e Psicoanalisi, (Bollati Boringhieri, Turin).

Cosimo Schinaia has worked as a psychiatrist at the Mental Health Service in Sanremo, Finale Ligure, Genoa, and at the Psychiatric Department of the Sacco Hospital in Milan. In 1990 he became director of the Psychiatric Hospital in Cogoleto (Ge), then director of the Residential Psychiatric Facilities at Quarto and ultimately Director of the Department of Mental Health in central Genoa. Retiring in 2011 from State Health Service, he now runs a private practice in Genoa.

Cosimo Schinaia after specialising in Psychiatry at the University of Pavia in 1980, in 1984 started his  training analysis  with Gilda De Simone until 1990. The supervisors were Carla Preve, Roberto Speziale Bagliacca and Dario De Martis. He also attended the Infant Observation group conducted by Mauro Morra and clinical supervision groups run by Lina Generali Clemens and occasionally by Elisabeth Bott Spilllius, John Steiner, Eric Brenman and Irma Brenman Pick. In Venice he participated in a group on psychosis conducted by  Salomon Resnik, in Milan in a group focusing on serious psychopathologies run by Fausto Petrella and in Novara in clinical seminars held by Donald Meltzer. In 1996 he became associate, becoming full member in 2002 and training and supervising analyst in 2013. He has attended national and international psychiatric and psychoanalytic conferences and congresses.

In 1997 he published the book Dal Manicomio alla Città. L’”Altro” Presepe di Cogoleto (Laterza, Rome-Bari), preface by Fausto Petrella. The book is about a psychoanalyst working in a psychiatric hospital and his view on the human and institutional events that highlight life inside an obsolete mental asylum. In 1998 he published Il Cantiere delle Idee (La Clessidra, Genoa), a conversation with the writer Edoardo Sanguineti, the photographer Giorgio Bergami and the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Carmelo Conforto on the main aspects of the closure of the Psychiatric Hospital where he had been director. In 2001 ”Altri Sguardi” (T-scrivo, Rome) was published with photographs by Uliano Lucas and an introductory text in which Cosimo Schinaia describes the subsequent phases of the closure of the Psychiatric Hospitals in Italy. Many of his publications have focused on the psychoanalyst’s work in the public psychiatric institutions showing how his two identities – the psychiatric and psychoanalytic ones - are interwoven. The paper presented at the IPSO Congress in San Francisco in 1995, the title being “The Mistake in Analytic Supervision. Patient, Candidate and Supervisor in the Field” is a first study on the psychoanalytic identity in the first phases of the education. The work was subsequently published with the title "L’Errore e l’Errare. Paziente, Candidato e Supervisore in Campo”, Rivista di Psicoanalisi, XLIII,1: 77-88, 1997. The analyst candidate reflects on the sense and defensive implications of mistakes within the relationship between the trainee analyst/patient and the relationship between student/supervisor. The mistake can become a means of enrichment in understanding or as a trail maker in the therapeutic  impasse depending on the quality of control present in the relationships between patient – candidate - supervisor. A detailed work on the analytic setting was presented in 2002 at the National SPI Congress in Trieste with the title “Sul Numero delle Sedute Settimanali. Passare da Tre a Quattro” (On the Number of Sessions. Passing from Three to Four), published in G. Berti Ceroni (Ed.), Come Cura la Psicoanalisi? (How Does Psychoanalysis Care?), pp. 314-328, Franco Angeli, Milan, 2005. In this work he underlined the transference and counter-transference peculiarities of passing from three to four sessions a week in the analysis of a patient with severe paranoid anxieties. The theoretical-technical considerations are further explained in “Tra Continuità e Discontinuità. Intrecci del Moderno e del Postmoderno in Psicoanalisi” (Between Continuity and Discontinuity. The Modern and the Postmodern intertwined in Psychoanalysis), published in Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane, XL, 2: 165-180, 2006.

A further area of scientific interest is found in the study of perversions, particularly in paedophilia and transsexualism. His last studies are about psychoanalysis and architecture. He has collaborated for many years with the Journal Psiche. Since 1996 he has held theoretical-clinical seminars at the Psychoanalytic Center in Genoa as part of their scientific evening programme. He has held seminars at the Psychoanalytic Centres of Padua, Bologna, Florence, Rome and Milan in Italy and in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Lyon, New York, London, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In Genoa, he has organized many SPI psychoanalysts’ books presentations and exchange meetings between psychoanalysts and experts from other fields of knowledge.

1996 – 2002 Director of the psychiatry Journal “ La Via del Sale”.

2001-2008 Editor of the Journal SPI Psiche

1998-2002 Secretary of the Commissione Nazionale Intercentri della Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (Italian Psychoanalitic Centers Committee).

2001-2004 part of the SPI Commissione Stampa (Press Committee).

2000-2005 member of the Outreach Commission of the International Psychoanalytical Association (European section, Secretary Ian Dalewijk then Franziska Ylander), elected Vice Secretary in Madrid in 2001. 2001-2007 selected by the SPI as member of the Working Party Interface of the European Federation of Psychoanalysis (Shmuel Erlich President). Since 2007 he has been part of the SPI Foreign Commission.

In 2001 he was nominated member of the National Commission of “Psicoanalisi e Istituzioni di Cura” (Psychoanalysis and Psychiatric Care Institutions) of the SPI chaired by Giuseppe Berti Ceroni.

Has been part of the FEP Working Party on clinical comparison methods conducted by Olivier Bonnard. He was reviewer for the Rivista di Psicoanalisi and referee for the Journal Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane.

In 2012 he was nominated Secretary of the SPI Commissione Emendamenti dello Statuto (SPI Statute Amendments Committee).

Since 2016 part of the Training Committee for the Milan section of the SPI Training Institute.