1852-1929

Enrico Morselli, an Italian psychiatrist, academic, and active promoter of the Italian positivist school of neuropsychiatry, was born in Modena on July 17, 1852, and died in Genoa on February 18, 1929.

A famous clinician and president of the Italian Society for Neurology and Psychiatry, he was director of various psychiatric hospitals and took an interest in many disciplines, ranging from anthropology to philosophy and biology to psychiatry. As an influential personage in Italian cultural circles at the beginning of the twentieth century, this Lombrosian organicist never missed an opportunity to vaunt the superiority of the "Italian Lombroso" over the "Austrian Freud."

His writings deal with a great variety of subjects: He discussed euthanasia and suicide, pathological psychology and animal psychology, psychiatry, traumatic neuroses, semiotics and anthropology, magnetism, spiritualism, forensic medicine, and blood transfusions.

He is also known as the author of a large two-volume work titled La Psicanalisi (Psychoanalysis), published in Milan by Boca in 1926. Reprinted many times and widely promoted in university circles, it would be impossible to underestimate its disastrous influence on psychoanalysis in Italy. An apparently well-documented work, it is a magnificent example of resistance to psychoanalysis, of incomprehension and the impossibility of comprehending. Just after it was published, Sigmund Freud wrote a letter to the author on February 18, 1926, in which he spoke of Morselli's "important" work while regretting that he could not give his "approval to our young science: what is referred to as psychoanalysis—esteemed colleague—is not psychoanalysis!" (1960a).

Marked by Lombrosian thinking and paternalistic concepts, Morselli criticized all of Freud's theories from sex to religious questions. Horrified by homosexuality and so-called perversions of any kind, he adopted a moralistic attitude and delighted in the use of exasperating mockery. He repeatedly accused Freud of plagiarism, and tried at length to prove that all the foundations of Freudian research already existed in the work of the Italian positivist school. Freud's letter in response to La Psicanilisi is an interesting example of Freud's tact and tactical sense; making an effort to speak positively about Morselli's work, he nevertheless uses this foil to advance the cause of psychoanalysis.

Bibliography

Contri, B. Giacomo. (1994). Il Pensiero di natura. Milan: Sipiel.

Freud, Sigmund. (1960a [1873-1939]). Letters of Sigmund Freud, 1873-1939. (Ernst L. Freud, Ed.; Tania and James Stern, Trans.). London: Hogarth.

Gramaglia, Giancarlo. (1992). Notes sur la psychanalyse italienne entre les deux guerres, 1915-1945. Revue internationale d'histoire de la psychanalyse, 5, 129-142.

Morselli, Enrico Agostino. (1926). La Psicoanalisi, Studii ed appunti critici, vol. I: La Dottrina, vol. II: La Practici. Milan: Fratelli Bocca.

—GIANCARLO GRAMAGLIA

International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Copyright © 2005 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.