The Psychoanalysis of War PDF
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1^ \977 ^pi $29^ PSVCHO- ANAD5IS WAR OF FRANCO FORNARI ^' M .^. THE PSYCHOANALYSIS WAR OF -M Dr. Franco Fornari is a practicing psychiatrist and psycho- analyst in Italy. He is currently president of the Italian Psy- choanalytic Society and Director of the Institute of Psychol- ogy at the University of Milan. His most important works deal with the psychoanalysis of children {The Original Af- fective Life of the Child, published in Italy by Feltrinelli), psychoanalysis of psychosis, and the new directions of social psychoanalysis [The Psychoanalysis of War, published by Feltrinelli, The Psychoanalysis of the Nuclear Situationy published by Rizzoli, and The Desecration of War^ published by Feltrinelli). His most recent work, written with Bianca Fomari and published by G. Principato, is Psychoanalysis and Literary Research, which contains a model for the psy- choanalytic investigation of works of literature. This is Dr. Fomari's first book to be published in the United States. Franco Fornari THE PSYCHOANALYSIS WAR OF Translated from the Italian by Alenka Pfeifer ANCHOR BOOKS Anchor Press/Doubleday Garden City, NewYork 1974 The PsychoaTialysis of War {PsicdTudisi Delia Guerra) was orig- inally published in Milan by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore in © 1966. Copyright 1966 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore. Anchor Books Edition: 1974 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Fomari, Franco. The psychoanalysis of war. Translation of Psicanalisi della guerra. Bibliography 1. War—Psychological aspects. I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Psychoanalytic interpretation. 2. War. U22 F727pa] U22.3.F6713 355.o2'oi9 ISBN 0-385-04347-3 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 78-I2369I © TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT 1974 BY DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FIRST EDITION CONTENTS Introduction vii 1 The War Phenomenon 1 2 Warin Primitive Societies 39 3 The Psychoanalytic Literature on War 77 4 Formationand Functions ofthe Group 131 5 PsychoanalyticReflections on theNuclearEra 153 Epilogue 237 Additional Readings 263 Index 271 INTRODUCTION This book is an elaboration, with some additions and revi- sions, of a paper I presented at the Twenty-fifth Congress ofRomanceLanguage Psychoanalysts,held in Milan in the spring of 1964. It was translated into French by Madame Pape-Scognamiglio and published, in conjunction with the Congress, by the Presses Universitaires de France. In France, therefore, in contrast with the course of events in Italy, this book was published before my Psychoanaly- sis of Nuclear War^ the French translation of which is presentlybeingpublished by Gallimard. In a certain sense it would have been preferable if the present volume had been published first in Italy as well. In it I discuss the fundamental dynamics psychoanalysis detects in the war phenomenon, setting them, however, against the background of sociological and ethnological studies of the same problem, and vdthout neglecting the contributions of other psychoanalytic authors. The book thus presents not only the results of my own investigation but—given the extreme gravity and complexity of the problems—also the testimony of a number of scholars in this field. While The Psychoanalysis of Nuclear War is a specific investigation of the war crisis created by the nuclear era, and consequently of the crisis of the sovereign state, as a type of state organization closely associated with the war via Introduction phenomenon, in this book I intend to apply the psycho- analytic instrument of investigation to the study of the warphenomenon in general. The reader who has kindly followed my former endeav- ors will find in this book broader cultural references serving as a frame to the thesis of the individual respon- sibilities for war which is here understood not as some- thing vague and mystical but as an empirical psychoana- lytic disclosure and as a presupposition for allowing the individual to escape from his alienation in thestate. In fact, I believe that in our times when, ovdng to the advent of the nuclear era, the state, "the industrialist of the violence saved by the citizens," is becoming (to use the language of the Kanachi tribes whom we shall discuss later) "the sorcerer who kills us," the crucial problem is that of abolishing the monopolization and capitalization of violenceby the state. The first question which the man in the street would ask of a psychoanalyst concerned with war might be the following: What right has a psychoanalyst to occupy him- self with these matters which are not in his competence? My answer is that the psychoanalyst, analyzing persons ex- periencing political problems, finds himself in a privileged position to observe the individual modes, that is, the in- ternal mechanisms through which political and social ex- periences in general are elaborated. He is, therefore, in the best of positions to observe both the influence exerted by the unconscious on men's political preferences and the ways in which war is fantasied in the unconscious. The psychoanalyst is particularly able to observe, through sym- bolic language and the affective dialectic (which has its own specific laws different from those of dialectic under- stood as a purely cognitive experience), that individuals' political preferences as well as their experiences in war —in addition to containing realistic motives—are influ-
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