Enzo Joseph Bonaventura’s La psicoanalisi: The importance of his thinking, history of a repression

Abstract

Enzo Joseph Bonaventura (1891-1948) was one of the most authoritative figures of experimental psychology in Italy between the two World Wars. Bonaventura was also a pioneer of the Italian Psychoanalysis, to which he dedicated the exhaustive handbook titled La psicoanalisi . The aim of this paper is to review La psicoanalisi in order to reconstruct a painful historical period that has been mostly forgotten. Born in Pisa to a Jewish family, in 1913, Bonaventura graduated from Florence University with a degree in philosophy. His supervising professor, Francesco De Sarlo, hired him as an assistant in the University Laboratory of Psychology. Bonaventura was a polyhedral figure with interests spanning across many fields such as philosophy, theology, developmental psychology, psychology of motivation and education. He was also a charismatic figure in the Italian Zionist movement. Expelled from the University of Florence because of the Italian “Racial Laws”, he moved to Jerusalem where he played an important role in the development of academic psychology research in Israel. He died tragically on the 13 th of April, in an ambush to the convoy of medical staff by the Hadassah.