Obituary Notice

Francesco Caracciolo Di Forino, President of the Centro Italiano di Psicologia Analitica, died on the 16th of November 1984, at the age of 60.

A week after his death his last paper, ‘Testimony on Freud and Jung’, was read as the introduction to the Fourth National Conference of the C.I.P.A. This paper, written during the difficulties and sufferings of his last months, was his spiritual testament, in which he traced out his own personal story: the long years of analysis, first Freudian, and then Jungian with Ernest Bernard; his training analysis with Emma Jung; his experiences as a candidate at the C. G. Jung Institute, Zürich; his nine years as a lay psychotherapist at the Kreutzlingen clinic with Fierz and Binswanger; and finally the period from 1965 to his death after his return to Rome, a period in which he dedicated himself with his usual passionate energy to his clinical practice, to his work as a training analyst and, in the last year, to his commitments as the president of the C.I.P.A.

Among those fortunate enough to have known him, Francesco Caracciolo will be remembered above all for two things. First, for his profound love for learning, a love that found its expression in his vast personal library of more than 30,000 volumes, which covered almost every aspect of human culture from psychology, sociology, anthropology to history, philosophy, history of art, music and history or religion. One of his last tasks was the reorganisation of this library, which he left to the C.I.P.A. in his will. His other deep interest was in the psychotherapy of the psychoses, an interest that sprang from his clinical experience at Kreutzlingen, his work as an analytical psychologist and his own particular sensibility to the sufferings of others. His awareness of the limits of the classical psychoanalytical setting in the therapy of the psychotic patient and of the need for a confrontation between analytical psychologists and those practising psychoth