Cesare Musatti (1897–1989)

Cesare Musatti was born in Mira, a small town in the Venetian province, on the 21st September, 1897, from a Venetian family. He read mathematics and philosophy at the University of Padova, graduated there, and was then assistant lecturer of his former teacher, Vittorio Benussi of Trieste, to whom he succeeded in the chair of psychology in 1927. Musatti's personal and cultural interest for psychoanalysis was born during those years of association with Benussi. He was forced to leave the University by the racial persecution of the times, and after the war he was appointed director of the Institute of Psychology of the University of Milan.

During his years in Milan Musatti was the figure around whom, within the framework of the S.P.I., the northern italian group of psychoanalysts gathered, and subsequently established the Institute and Centre of Psychoanalysis of Milan. Musatti was repeatedly President of the S.P.I., and for a long time presided the Milan Centre.

Together with Nicola Perrotti and Emilio Servadio, Musatti founded the Rivista di Psicoanalisi, the official publication of the S.P.I., and with his experience in the field of scientific research and publishing was actively engaged in promoting and shaping it. His impressively vast scientific work combines an interest for experimental psychology (among other things, Musatti introduced the Gestalt theory into Italy) with that for psychoanalysis and for psychoanalytic research (culminating in his Trattato di Psicoanalisi and in the editorship of the Italian translation of Freud's works). Significant examples of this can be found in some of his well-known - and also less known - writings: “Elementi di psicologia della testimonianza” , “La dottrina psicoanalitica degli istinti” ; “La funzione del sogno” ; “Intorno al meccanismo dell'allucinazione” (1947, in which in a totally original manner, the author is ahead of his times in examining certain themes that are highly relevant to present-day psychoanalytical researc