Franco Fornari (1921–1985)

On the 21 May 1985 Franco Fornari died suddenly in Milan, at the age of 64.

Franco Fornari was a leading European psychoanalyst and had been President of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society and later on full Professor of Dynamic Psychology at the University of Milan.

Fornari trained in medicine, specializing in psychiatry, and trained as a psychoanalyst immediately after the Second World War. His training analyst was Professor C. L. Musatti, one of the surviving pioneers of European psychoanalysis and one of the few who managed to keep the discipline alive under the fascist regime. After the war, Professor Musatti was very active in helping to spread the message of psychoanalysis in Italy at a time when the country was immersed in a difficult cultural situation and dominated by strong ideological resistance to psychoanalysis both from the Catholic church and from some areas of the extreme left movement.

Fornari soon became one of the leading figures of the new generation of Italian psychoanalysts. As a result of his interest in the treatment of psychosis, he went to Switzerland and studied for a while with Madame Sechehaye. In the late nineteen-fifties he became increasingly interested in the work of Melanie Klein and her followers and of the British School, and greatly contributed to the introduction of this work in Italy. As a consequence of both his personal interest and of the stimuli presented by the culture and problems of the country in which he was living, together with the respective positions at that time not only of Europe but also of America and Russia, Fornari became more and more interested in the possibility of applying psychoanalytical insight to the study of socio-political problems.

He was concerned in particular with the dangers related to nuclear confrontations and possible nuclear war, after the first horrifying experiences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following Freud's message and example and his painstaking work in both clinical and applied p