C. L. Musatti (1897–1989)

On 10 March 1989 C. L. Musatti died in Milan. He was 92 years old. He was born on 21 September 1897 in Dolo, a little village near Venice, the same day, as he used to remind his friends and pupils, on which Freud wrote to Fliess about his most important discoveries on the psychic nature of the sexual and aggressive fantasies of his patients towards their parents.

Musatti was brought up in an intellectual Jewish Italian middle-class mileu and family which was also involved in politics; his father and grandfather were fervent socialists. Musatti studied mathematics, philosophy and psychology at Padua University, where he was deeply influenced by Professor Benussi, one of the most outstanding figures in experimental psychology of that time, who also stimulated Musatti's interest in psychoanalysis.

His interest in psychoanalysis developed in a period that was particularly fertile for European psychological studies. Following the crisis in scientific research at the end of the nineteenth century, this period saw the development of new ideas which were to prove the most up to date basis for the formation of the panorama of psychology of our century.

In Italy, with the introduction of Freud's teaching, through Edoardo Weiss, who was working in Trieste, and Benussi, who arrived at the University of Padua from Graz, Musatti, then a young student, had the opportunity of coming into contact with the suggestions of the school of Meinung and with the 'revision' of the Gestalt theory with regard to its functionalistic and atomistic basis.

Musatti made a creative synthesis of those various theoretical positions. He not only contributed creatively to the theoretical discussions on the relationships between structural and experiential factors of the Gestalt psychology but he himself formulated theoretical propositions, trying to integrate the structural and the experiential factors in the light of a sole principle on the basis of what Musatti called 'a tendency towards maximum homo