The State Terrifier
Franco Fornari, Melanie Klein, and The Psychoanalysis of War
Ramsey McGlazer
What does a war want? In 1966, the Italian psychoanalyst Franco Fornari set out to answer this question. He brought out The Psychoanalysis of War that year in Italian, and it appeared in English, translated by Alenka Pfeifer, in 1974. The book was written at the height of the Cold War nuclear era, with humanity facing what Fornari calls, in a great Greco-Roman phrase, “the pantoclastic prospect,” meaning the possibility of total annihilation, the expectation of wholesale world destruction. Fornari describes the time of his writing as a “historical moment when humanity, driven by its deep psychotic anxieties, is apt to perish in the attempt to identify with phantasms in order to destroy phantasms.” This formulation clarifies the stakes of Fornari’s study. And these stakes could not be higher. Phantasms, including the figure of the Communist as existential threat, are treated as real because states work to make it impossible to distinguish between illusion and reality. Our inability to engage in rigorous reality testing gives rise to an actual existential threat, and paranoid-schizoid prophecies become self-fulfilling: The actually existing world really is liable to end, and humanity really is “apt to perish.” These become plausible collective prospects and not only individual fears or infantile phantasies under conditions of mutually assured destruction.
This situation persists, Fornari argues, because there is no one to account for, let alone treat, what he calls the psychotic dimension in armed conflicts between states. The Psychoanalysis of War begins by taking the measure of this dimension and by noting that it has been ignored in previous political, economic, historical, and anthropological studies of war. Without discounting these studies, Fornari contends that they fail to see what practicing psychoanalysts become capable of seeing: that war is not only a matter of “realistic motives” but is also “influenced by systems of defense against psychotic anxieties.” Fornari is aware of the depoliticizing insistence that psychoanalysis stay in its lane, that it should see its mission as local and not general, that it should content itself with treating “a minority of sick people.” This is what The Psychoanalysis of War refuses to do. Instead, Fornari tries to show that we ignore the psychotic dimension—or what analysts of other persuasions might simply call the unconscious—at our planetary peril.
Why, Fornari asks, did “the commander of the B-52 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima” name the plane that carried the bomb “after his mother, Enola Gay”? And why did “General Leslie Graves, director of the Manhattan Project and father of the atomic bomb,” send Harry Truman a cable “after a successful first experiment” that read, “‘Baby is born”? Fornari frames his answer as a “truth that clinical experience teaches us”: “When a destructive reality is covered with symbols of love”—as when Enola Gay becomes the Enola Gay, a bomb is called “baby,” or, in a different dystopian time and place, an AI-driven tracking system is named “Where’s Daddy?”—“this may constitute a maneuver meant to conceal deep depressive or persecutory anxieties,” leading to “grave distortions in reality-testing” that worsen destruction and endanger the world.
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The Psychoanalysis of War remains Fornari’s best-known book. His other claim to current fame is having helped introduce Italian analysts to the pathbreaking work of Melanie Klein. These two career achievements may seem to point in different directions, one outward, toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the other inward, toward the world of infantile phantasy or toward the interior that is the clinic, which Klein recast as a space for play therapy. For Fornari, though, these two commitments were only apparently at odds.
Although war was often on her patients’ minds, Klein famously focused on intrapsychic struggles, on the “Hitler inside.” “Richard wanted to punish the Hitler-Daddy for having put such a dangerous starfish genital into Mummy.” “The fear that the bad Hitler-penis inside him would control and destroy him made him want to throw it out of himself (as well as out of Mummy).” These interpretations from Klein’s Narrative of a Child Analysis, a record of her wartime work, show that she did not attempt to deny the fact of total war altogether; there could be no “Hitler inside” without one outside. Still, Klein repeatedly redirected her patients’ attention, turning from naval battles and aerial bombardments toward the starfish-genitals and other appendages that showed up in scenes of internal strife.
“Why, Fornari asks, did ‘the commander of the B-52 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima’ name the plane that carried the bomb ‘after his mother, Enola Gay’?”
For his part, Fornari wanted to understand how psychic struggles continued—how they were cataclysmically scaled up—in the theater of war. Klein’s portraits of pre-Oedipal psychic life might seem far removed from the field of “polemology,” the study of war, that Fornari hoped to expand in an effort to address the potential and real disasters of the nuclear age. But in The Psychoanalysis of War, Fornari argued that untreated psychic conflicts, including those that begin at the earliest stages of infancy, were not irrelevant to ongoing military campaigns. This did not mean that psychoanalysis alone could offer the cure for war, but it did imply that clinical work could affect peacemaking projects. Klein herself had written in 1933: “The repeated attempts that have been made to improve humanity—in particular to make it more peaceable—have failed, because nobody has understood the full depth and vigour of the instincts of aggression innate in each individual.” Fornari sought to honor and extend this insight, plumbing intrapsychic depths while also working to bring Klein’s thought to bear on wars waged outside the nursery.
In her landmark study War in the Nursery, Denise Riley shows how “a diluted Kleinianism” came to inform psychoanalytic and popular parenting orthodoxy in the UK during and after World War II. This orthodoxy underscored the difference that environmental factors and especially the work of mothering made. Riley notes that Klein, by contrast, emphasized the infant’s “innate psychic attributes.” For her, these attributes—which included, in Klein’s words, “greed, hate, and persecutory anxieties” as well as envy—did not stem from deficient parenting but were unavoidable for even the most deftly held, carefully protected, and consummately well-fed child. They came with the territory of living for even the best-loved baby. “For on the whole,” Riley writes, “the infantile unconscious pursued its inexorable path in loneliness, directed by emotions of frustration and persecution that had little to do with the external life of the child.”
So when Klein referred to “the full depth and vigour of the instincts of aggression in each individual,” she really did mean in each and every individual, because, for her, no one was spared the ordeal of infancy. She also meant it when, with characteristic confidence, she said that no one else had fully grasped this fact. It is painful, after all, for anyone to try to fathom forms of suffering that no possible care can prevent. Klein argues that as long as we avoid this fathoming, wars will continue, and efforts to oppose militarism will run aground. They will be ill-fated, as they have been historically, because it is not enough naively to “encourage the positive, well-wishing impulses of the person while denying or suppressing his aggressive ones,” which will have their say.
Fornari would agree, and it is possible to read The Psychoanalysis of War as a sustained elaboration of this Kleinian claim. This reading would go some way toward accounting for Fornari’s project, but I think it would also understate his distinctive contributions to psychoanalysis and to Kleinianism. Writing from a different Cold War situation—not the UK, where Klein’s ideas entered the mainstream, but Italy, where they were breaking news—Fornari worked not to dilute but to sharpen her theories. He took seriously the prospect of treating what, sounding somewhat skeptical, she had called a “more peaceable” humanity, and he earnestly envisioned a worldwide society that would commit to the work of fathoming its own anxieties and aggression. The Psychoanalysis of War lays out a program for this society’s possible realization. The process unfolds under the sign of abolition.
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To observe this is to note the distance that separates Fornari’s thought from Klein’s, which privileges the process she called “reparation.” For Klein, psychic reparation was not coextensive with the monetary reparations paid to nations in the interwar and postwar periods. It was a developmental achievement, alleviating guilt and attending mourning. For children and adults alike, reparation was a way of trying to reintegrate with love the objects one had divided up and damaged, or at least wanted badly to destroy.
Recent critiques of Klein have challenged us to reconsider reparation’s salutary psychic effects and to recognize its political limits. Readers including David Eng and Carolyn Laubender have argued that Kleinian reparation puts feeling better first. What matters most, by this account, is the effort to offer repair, and the effects of this undertaking, its consequences for the object, are bracketed. As Eng writes, “the infant’s precarious life takes precedence over the precarious existence of the (m)other.” So, too, does the inner world of the ego sometimes seem to block Klein’s view of the outer world of damaged life. In this connection, Eng quotes Klein’s description of how “in former times … ruthless cruelty against native populations was displayed by people who not only explored, but conquered and colonized.” In fact, the “former times” had not—and have not—ended. For Eng, Klein’s account of reparation denies this fact and so furthers efforts to assuage the liberal guilt of European colonial powers, relegating the consequences of colonialism, and the reality of responsibility for colonial violence, to the past.
Without ever polemically targeting Klein, Fornari anticipates these critiques of her work as he calls for a practice of psychoanalysis that is indissociable from social struggle and expressly anticolonial. He recognizes and repeatedly confronts the persistence of colonial projects in the present of his writing. That may sound like a low bar for a leftist—indeed, it is—but the Palestine Exception’s staying power in today’s psychoanalytic establishment suggests that this kind of recognition still can’t be taken for granted among clinicians. In The Psychoanalysis of War, Fornari moves beyond the acknowledgment of ongoing colonial violence to argue openly for “the abolition of the sovereignty of the state.” Fornari even calls such an outcome “inevitable” in a brief but bracing passage: “The reappropriation by each individual of the aggressiveness saved by him and deposited into the state, as if into a bank, thus appears to be the path that must be taken if the state is to be liberated from the accumulation of private violence which it has monopolized, capitalized, and finally increased to nuclear proportions.” For Fornari, the state’s liberation would thus entail the abolition of its sovereignty, which would in fact bring about our liberation from it. In an act of collective armed robbery, we would take back from the state the power that we have lent it, reclaiming the aggressiveness that we have—provisionally, not permanently—handed over to it.
On the one hand, this just-so story—which says that we have saved up our destructiveness and “deposited” it “into the state, as if into a bank”—keeps a liberal fantasy alive. It suggests that we have consented to be governed, that at some point or in some mythic past we entered as individual wage-earners—unmarked by race, gender, immigration status, or imprisonment—into contracts with the state. On the other hand, Fornari lays stress on the state’s monopolization, capitalization, and nuclear concentration of violence. These are expropriative and coercive rather than consensual processes, and emphasizing them leads Fornari far away from liberal guilt. Think of how heretical—how offensive to liberal sensibilities—it still is to suggest that states come and go, or that, like Rhodesia, they live and die, or that, as Samera Esmeir has argued, we could refuse to “play the game of states” run by the current international order, that we could collectively desert this order, with its “rights and claims, its terms and forms.” This is in effect what Fornari argues in The Psychoanalysis of War, where he also contends, counterintuitively, that psychoanalysis has a role to play in the struggle to abolish the sovereign state.
It is impossible to imagine Klein writing in this way or speculating at this social scale. Her genre is not speculative fiction but rather body horror, at times combined with a kind of family romantasy. Her work asks us to return to “the child’s fear of being devoured, or cut up, or torn to pieces, or its terror of being surrounded and pursued by menacing figures,” which Klein renders luridly; “and we know,” she continues, “that the man-eating wolf, the fire-spewing dragon, and all the evil monsters out of myths and fairy-stories flourish and exert their unconscious influence in the phantasy of each individual child.” This is all very vivid, but my point, to put it crudely, is that in Klein’s work it is not the state that tears children to pieces.
That said, the contrast between Klein and Fornari is not always so stark. Fornari is not always the firebrand that he seems to be when he is calling for the reappropriation of our aggressiveness and the abolition of state sovereignty. Fornari served as president of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana (SPI), in which his teacher, Cesare Musatti, had played a founding role. Far from breaking with Italy’s psychoanalytic establishment, Fornari thus helped to sustain it. But this meant something different in Fornari’s Italy than it would have in Klein’s England (or in Anna Freud’s, or in Adam Phillips’s). Although the Italian left would go on to suffer devastating and prolonged defeats—defeats so prolonged that they continue to this day—during the 1960s and most of the 1970s, it retained a presence in politics that went far beyond its place in the Cold War Anglosphere.
“In Klein’s work it is not the state that tears children to pieces.”
Italy had warmed to psychoanalysis belatedly. Before the postwar period, the over-proximity of the Church and the repressive measures of the Fascist Party had led to decades of deferral. The SPI was initially founded in 1925, but with psychoanalysis deemed a Jewish science and otherwise degenerate, the Society was made inactive by the passage of the Fascist racial laws. The organization was then reestablished by Musatti, among others, in 1946. Students of psychoanalysis in Italy have argued that this delay had an upside: it gave Italian analysts some distance from the orthodoxies that had already hardened elsewhere. It allowed for the emergence of a less dogmatic understanding of psychoanalysis and for the formation of what Sergio Benvenuto calls an “eclectic, unclassifiable psychoanalytic koiné or community.” It was in this community that Fornari set up his clinic, and in this koiné or shared language that he wrote The Psychoanalysis of War.
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I read Fornari’s book against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing genocidal war in Gaza, and I began writing this essay two days after Israel claimed outrageously to be pursuing a strategy of “de-escalation through escalation.” This claim, like the US-backed genocide in general, seems to bear out much of Fornari’s argument. It takes sustained psychic effort, I imagine, not to see the absurdity in “de-escalation through escalation.” Like so much recent hasbara, or like anything that Matthew Miller used to say smirkingly during his Biden-era State Department press conferences, the phrase is nothing if not a testament to what Fornari names “grave distortions in reality-testing.”
Considering the possibility of de-escalation in the context of the Cold War, Fornari argues that “the problems of dissuasion from aggression” are not “purely military ones. They cannot be left in the hands of just any general who may, perhaps, be concerned about impotence and yet know nothing at all about the unconscious anxieties which such problems of impotence may determine, or about the influence these anxieties may exert, especially in the field of military decision-making.” This claim, too, can be brought to bear on current Zionist violence, which Jake Romm has called a response to “the deep psychic wound” that is “feminizing defeat.” “Paging Dr. Freud,” people used to joke, long before pager jokes went the way of Israeli propaganda.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that The Psychoanalysis of War is comprehensively correct, let alone that we need Fornari’s wild analysis to understand the continuing genocide in Gaza. Admittedly, the book reads at times like an unwitting parody of Kleinian thinking, as when Fornari, painting with a broad phallic brush, writes: “Since, in men’s unconscious, weapons are equated with the penis, disarmament is in general feared as castration. This would account for the general unpopularity of disarmament.” (In his devastating critique of Fornari’s homophobia, the gay communist Mario Mieli would call attention to the analyst’s deficient “sense of humour,” among many other shortcomings stemming from the “phallus in the brain.”) At other times, the Italian analyst comes across as shockingly credulous in his Eurocentrism, as when he claims that the “bellicose tribes of Oceania have been in a state of particularly depressive confusion ever since the Europeans imposed peace on them.” With peace like this, who needs war?
But the US war in Vietnam was ongoing at the time of Fornari’s writing, and he was consistent if not eloquent in his anticolonialism. In The Psychoanalysis of War, he distinguishes between war—the main subject of the book—and anticolonial struggles for independence. (He does not offer a detailed typology, but the latter kinds of conflicts presumably include all wars fought against US empire.) He carves out an exemption for what he calls “wars of liberation,” where the persecution is not illusory. There really is an enemy, an occupying army, in struggles to overthrow colonial regimes. Although the unconscious is still an inescapable factor in such struggles, here the “incredible paradox” that Fornari sees in other wars does not obtain. He is referring to the fact that these wars’ chief purpose is not to deliver us “from an external enemy, but to find a real enemy” onto whom we can project guilt and hatred, avoiding a confrontation with the enemy within.
Fornari’s other names for this all-important enemy within include “the Internal Terrifier,” “the Internal Depressive Terrifier,” and “the Internal Terrifying Persecutor.” All of these names point to a figure who is “not flesh and blood” but rather the mental representative of “an absolute danger” of the kind we face, “for example, in nightmares.” For Fornari, this is the figure whose attacks are evaded in and through war, the figure whose violence—indeed whose very existence—war lets us avoid. But the Terrifier is also the figure targeted in war, though only indirectly. A disavowed sense of guilt and loss compounds our defenselessness before the Terrifier’s nightmarish presence, which Fornari also associates with Freudian death drive. In the “paranoid elaboration of mourning,” we project our terrifying inner world onto the outer world, and this process of “exportation” makes it possible for “certain political operators to present war as a dramatic but definitely desirable event because it allows for the externalization of both the fear of being killed by what we love and the fear of killing what we love.”
On one level, Fornari is being orthodox in his Kleinianism here: The “paranoid elaboration of mourning” is his name for the avoidance of depressive mourning, of the experience of guilt that would follow from the recognition that we have damaged or minimally wanted to destroy even what we love most. But on another level, Fornari is inverting and radicalizing Klein’s approach by refusing to let the inner world eclipse the outer one.
According to Fornari, “psychoanalysis can show that even on the level of real conflicts of interests, which are expressed in class struggle, psychotic processes interfere which can decide, at a given moment, the character … concretely assumed by class struggle.” Note that this claim does not deny (as many Anglophone analysts might, if only unconsciously) either the existence or the urgency of class struggle. Nor does Fornari frame psychoanalysis as a substitute for this struggle or for any other “revolt of the oppressed classes.” He argues instead that psychoanalytic theory and practice can crucially supplement other forms of militancy, offering ways to respond when “psychotic processes interfere.”
And they always interfere, according to Fornari, who follows Klein in locating psychosis in every psyche and not only in the minds or brains of the mad. For Klein, our relations are always inescapably colored by unconscious phantasies. The inner sound-and-light show that starts in our infancy, formatively altering our perception, doesn’t simply come to a stop when we are weaned or leave home for school or reach adulthood or end analysis. The psychic mechanisms that Klein’s work identifies—fears of persecution, phantasies of omnipotence, feelings of impotence, operations of splitting, projection, attack, mourning, and repair—stay in motion. Psychoanalysis can help us recognize these dynamics and achieve what Fornari calls a “dialectical integration between the illusory and the real.” This does not mean simply exiting the illusory, let alone putting an end to ambivalence. For this reason, Klein’s work, a theory of ambivalence, remains a resource.
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In 1976, a reviewer writing in in The American Historical Review dismissed The Psychoanalysis of War in these instructive terms: “Historians will probably react with disbelief, if not outright amusement, to this aggravating book, hailed among many European scholars as a major contribution.” Predictably, the reviewer is not at all curious about the coexistence of aggravation and amusement, frustration and pleasure, in the experience of reading. To ask, as a psychoanalytic reader would, about this ambivalence would require overcoming what the reviewer calls the “chasm in methodology” that separates history from psychoanalysis. For the reviewer, Fornari’s book offers definitive proof that the chasm is unbridgeable. There can be no question of taking his boldest speculations on war, or especially on what could work against it, seriously: “When we reach the ‘practical’ recommendations … it is hard to avoid the impression that the sophisticated scientist has been replaced by a well-intentioned Boy Scout.”
This breezy dismissal attests, I think, more to the resistance to psychoanalysis among Anglophone historians than to the conceptual weakness or failure of Fornari’s project. The reviewer is resisting not psychoanalysis as such, but rather a version of analysis that, refusing to remain in place, sets aside the ideal of neutrality, leaves the confines of the consulting room, and works to understand social conflicts as well as psychic strife. To do this is to encroach on the territory of historians and other social scientists; it is to presume to know something about their proper objects, including the waging of wars, the etiology of armed conflicts, and what to do about their fallout. It is thus a bid for authority that prompts the reviewer to police the “practical” and to portray Fornari as not only utopian but also childish, a clueless Boy Scout.
“Remarkably, Fornari is calling for more guilt, not less; he is calling for a redistribution of badness, not for a universalization of goodness and innocence.”
What does a Boy Scout want? Among other things, he wants world peace and thinks naively (not like a “sophisticated scientist”) that such a thing can be achieved. Or so the reviewer would have us believe. But here the reviewer is projecting. In fact, the Scouts’ history can be traced to colonial Rhodesia, and it is not at all clear that the organization’s goals are pacifist. The first Scouts, deployed during the Boer War, before the Boy Scouts’ official founding, were child soldiers, and the organization remains militaristic to this day. The reviewer is being metaphorical when she refers to it, but I think we can see her reference as symptomatic all the same: It preserves war even in its effort to recast Fornari’s proposals as mere child’s play. Central to the American way of life, the commitment to perpetual war also runs deep, we now know, in the psyches of some members of the AHA.
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How have we come to accept the perpetual, world-ending wars waged by states, and what would it take to end this acceptance? The Psychoanalysis of War is at its most aspirational, speculative, and fanciful when, turning to the question of “what … is to be done,” Fornari asks how we can develop institutions to address “collective psychotic anxieties without recourse to war.” But the massive, mediating institutions that he proposes turn out to look unlike the Boy Scouts and unlike the nurseries and afterschool programs that Klein thought might flourish “in those distant days when child-analysis will become as much a part of every person’s upbringing as school education is now.” Fornari’s future institutions look more like Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Arc de Triomphe: World Institute for the Abolition of War, which was inspired by Fornari among others, or like what in An American Utopia Fredric Jameson (half-jokingly) calls the Psychoanalytic Placement Bureau. “We must,” Jameson writes, giving us marching orders, “imagine the emergence of a new kind of institution, destined to supplant traditional government and its agencies.” This institution would sustain the social world after abolition: “Presumably what is left of the police as an institution will eventually be absorbed into this central agency, which will eventually replace government and political structures equally, the state withering away into some enormous group therapy.”
“But is this not,” Jameson then asks, “precisely the political as such?” The political as such is precisely not, in most accounts, a form of “enormous group therapy.” Jameson’s provocation is in keeping, though, with Fornari’s vision of a “gigantesca condizione depressiva”: a colossal collective depression that, in true Kleinian fashion, would be curative. Treating this depression as indispensable, The Psychoanalysis of War ends by sketching the outlines of an “Omega Institution” that would facilitate subjective and social transformation. Like something out of science fiction, this institution would allow for war’s eventual supersession because it would be a corrective to both sovereign projection and the continuation of state terror that such projection sponsors. It would be a space for reckoning with the Internal Terrifier, for confronting and working through destructive impulses and ambivalence.
The result that Fornari envisions—the future that he foresees when he imagines that such a space could come into being—would not be a tension-free society. It would be something humbler and less wholecloth: a world that would stop short of self-destruction, refraining from nuclear war and on its way to ending war altogether. This may indeed be a naive prospect from any current point of view. Still, it is worth studying Fornari’s brief, blurry blueprint for a society sustained by an institution that, treating one person at a time, looks a lot like a clinic: a space for reckoning with hate and even murderous aggression. Repeatedly, Fornari calls this reckoning taking responsibility. (Think by contrast of the constantly repeated Zionist claim: We’re not genocidal—they are!) Fornari thinks that only the acknowledgment of responsibility can put a stop to rule by phantasm, shifting the terms of the current international order, ending the ongoing games of states.
It is worth repeating Fornari’s insistence that in order for this to work there can be no more colonies. In a 1963 essay on Frantz Fanon, Fornari makes the strange, even supremely counterintuitive case that the reason “we need” the forces of anticolonial liberation to triumph “as soon as possible” is because the alternative is an intolerable situation in which three quarters of humanity can continue rightly to see themselves as “good and innocent,” as the victims of colonial violence. In order to confront the threat of nuclear war, in light of the pantoclastic prospect, we have to create the conditions that allow everyone to assume “responsibility in the first person” for the war that could lead to humanity’s destruction. Remarkably, Fornari is calling for more guilt, not less; he is calling for a redistribution of badness, not for a universalization of goodness and innocence. He is claiming that colonialism stands in the way of democratization, where this word refers not to an achieved state of homeostatic flourishing, but to a process through which all people can reckon with the fact of being “at once victims and butchers.” No one should have a more just claim to the use of violence than anyone else, Fornari believes, and as long as colonialism persists—keeping us in a “predatory, prehuman condition”—some will wield violence more justly and others less so.
In such a world, it cannot be true that everyone, each individual, bears responsibility for war. That we need to bring about a world in which this would be true—and that only such a world would be truly human—is Fornari’s Fanonian claim. In The Psychoanalysis of War, Fornari takes pains to emphasize that his argument about individual responsibility for war is “not … something vague and mystical but… an empirical psychoanalytic disclosure and … a presupposition for allowing the individual to escape his alienation in the state.” And again: “the crucial problem is that of abolishing the monopolization and capitalization of violence by the state.” Fornari is clear that this process is not non-violent. We cannot, he contends, forever continue to deposit our aggression in the state. Taking it back would be better than therapy.