Franco Fornari

Franco Fornari (Rivergaro, 18 April 1921 - Milan, 20 May 1985) was an Italian psychiatrist, who was influenced by Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion.

He was a professor at the University of Milan and the University of Trento.

Fornari was born in Rivergaro (a hamlet about 20 km south of Piacenza), on 18 April 1921 and died in Milan on 20 May 1985.

He graduated in Medicine and Surgery and specialized in neuropsychiatry at the University of Milan.

He was interested in psychoanalysis and under the leadership of Caesare Musatti (of whom he was the first student analyst) he became an analyst member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Society.

He married and had five children.

His wife, Bianca Fornari, is also a psychoanalyst, as is his daughter, Gigliola Fornari Spoto.

In the Sixties he became interested in polemology and founded the first "anti-H group" and the Italian Institute of Polemology (ISTIP).

In 1962 he became professor of developmental psychology at the School of Specialization in Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Milan.

His early writings deepen psychotic dimension both in reference to man's original psychic development, such as La vita affettiva originaria del Bambino: 1963 (translation: The original affective life of the child), and to the treatment of schizophrenia and depression, the dynamics of groups and social conflict.

Fornari's Kleinian belief reaches its peak in the specifics of warfare research [Psicoanalisi della guerra atomica: 1964 (translation: Psychoanalysis of the Atomic War); Psicoanalisi della guerra: 1966 (translation: Psychoanalysis of War); Dissacrazione della guerra: 1969 (translation: Desecration of War); Psicoanalisi della situazione atomica: 1970 (translation: Psychoanalysis of the Atomic Situation).

In these works Fornari located the anxieties and psychotic fantasies that govern the behavior of individuals in groups, and he revealed the ensuing loss of responsibility in various social and political situations.

“War - as he says - arises from the outward projection of an internal danger and from denial of death and alienation in an external persecutor, who must be destroyed in order for others to survive.”

The next line of research was sexuality in relation to processes of affective symbolization.

His research on these subjects appeared in an essay titled Nuovi orientamenti nella psicoanalisi: 1966 (translation: New directions of Psychoanalysis).

In 1968 he obtained the chair of Dynamic Psychology, the first chair of psychoanalysis in Italy, at the Faculty of Sociology of Trento, which, as Fornari affirmed, he also chose because he was "stimulated by being with young people who wanted to engage in social activities".

In 1972 he became director of the Institute of Psychology at the University of Milan.

From 1973 to 1978 he served as president of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana.

From 1973 to 1978 he was president of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society.

In Genitalità e Cultura: 1975 (translation: Genitality and Culture) Fornari reconsiders the concept of perversion, with no culture as antithetical to sexuality, as Freud had argued, but to pregenitality, which would be based on a lack of symbolization of infantile nature and on the primacy of the destructive impulsive behavior.

According to him, war is an elaboration of the paranoid or projective mourning [Fornari: 1975].

The state plays an unconscious maternal-type role for its citizens.

War and violence originate and develop by the need for love, by the desire to preserve and defend the sacred object to which humans are emotionally attached, especially the mother-figure and the merging with her.

For adults, nations are sacred objects that generate war.

Sacrifice is the essence of war: it translates into the willingness of humans to die for their country by offering their bodies to it.

Fornari called war "the spectacular development of a general human situation in which death takes on an absolute value" in the certainty that ideas for which we die are true and this is why "death becomes a demonstrative process."

Though elements of symbolization are already present in the above-mentioned Genitalità e cultura, Fornari directly studied this topic in Simbolo e codice: 1976 (translation: Symbol and Code), I fondamenti di una teoria psicoanalitica del linguaggio:1979 (translation: Foundations of a psychoanalytic theory of language) and Codice vivente: 1981 (translation: Living Code).

In these essays Fornari also revisited the psychoanalytic theories in cognitive terms, laying the foundations for a true psychoanalytic anthropology, usable by non-psychoanalytic specialists.

He resolved the relation between body and mind by positing a code that preserves and transmits information in both directions between body and mind.

Such a code, which he called the "living code," is assumed in the programming of affects, which in fact is driven by one's erotic materiality and parental bonds.

Fornari developed a "coinemic" theory, in which the minimum unit of affective meaning is the "coineme", which unites affects and the language presiding to the various forms of communication.

In fact, Fornari saw this living code as an instrument and methodology that could be used to apply psychoanalysis to a broad range of cultural phenomena: literary texts, speech, music, images and behavior.

Franco Fornari dealt specifically with the psychoanalytic aspects of war.

He died from a sudden heart attack at his home in Milan in Via Plinio, in the late morning of May 20, 1985 after returning from teaching at the State University where he held the chair in Psychology.

His teaching and research have changed the history of psychology in Italy, breaking the traditional separation that characterized the relationship between psychology and psychoanalysis, and further bridging the divides between experimental and clinical.

Fornari began introducing in Italy the thoughts and the ideas of Melanie Klein.