Edoardo Weiss

The House That Freud Built

Paul Roazen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351322225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Edoardo Weiss (1889-1970) was a favored disciple of Freud and is acknowledged as the founder of psychoanalysis in Italy. Although he was the author of six books and over a hundred professional papers, he has remained a shadowy figure. In this volume, Paul Roazen provides a definitive portrait of this notable individual. Based on his extensive interviews with Weiss, Roazen evaluates the significance of Weiss's own contribution to psychoanalytic thought and practice and presents a fascinating picture of the reception given to Freud's thought in Italy.Despite his prominence, Weiss's life and work has not been well documented. Roazen shows that his links to modern Italian history and culture were extensive and closely bound to the political and social conflicts of the twentieth century. Born in the cosmopolitan city of Trieste, Weiss was the nephew of the novelist Italo Svevo, whose masterpiece The Confessions of Zeno remains one of the principle psychoanalytic novels in modern literature. Another Triestine, Umberto Saba, one of the great modern Italian poets, was Weiss's patient. Weiss's career also intersected with Italian politics. The daughter of one of Mussolini's cabinet ministers was one of his patients, an analysis that has raised questions about Freud's own relation to the Italian dictator. Roazen documents Weiss's tribulations in trying to establish a psychoanalytic culture opposed not only by the fascist regime but the Catholic Church. In spite of these instances of opposition, Roazen shows that the Italian intellectual world was highly receptive to Freudian ideas and that psychoanalysis is flourishing today in Italy.Weiss has never before been recognized as a front-rank analytic thinker, but he was leader of the movement in Italy, a country that mattered deeply to Freud. This, along with the genuine intimacy of his contacts with Freud makes Weiss a figure of considerable interest to students of psychoanalysis, Italian culture, and intellectual history.

1

Trieste

Weiss was born on September 21, 1889 in Trieste, a place that has increasingly stood out as one of the high-points in world cultural history.¹ It continues to attract scholarly attention, and has even been called “the greatest provincial capital of the twentieth century, a city that may not have equaled Paris or Berlin but certainly earned an extended chapter in the history of modernism.”² Sons of Trieste like Svevo and Saba memorably lived and wrote their great works there. Joyce also knew Weiss’s younger brother Ottocaro both in Trieste and Zurich,³ although Weiss was altogether too modest to have stressed that connection to me. (Besides Saba, it turns out that Weiss also analyzed Roberto Bazlen [1902–65], a man of letters; Weiss was “on friendly terms with most of the small band of Triestine intellectuals and writers.”⁴) Joyce had taught English at the Berlitz School in Trieste, and finished in that city his great book of short stories Dubliners. Joyce wrote not only A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in Trieste, but also parts of Ulysses in which at one point he played on the name “Weiss”⁵; Finnegans Wake had the famous line about “when they were yung and easily freudened.” Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini conducted in Trieste, and Rainer Maria Rilke was inspired by a castle outside the city to write his Duino Elegies. Franz Kafka worked for a Triestine insurance company in Prague, and Marcel Proust’s narrator in his sequence of great novels was obsessed by the Trieste lesbian activities of “Albertine.”

Situated at the extreme northeast corner of today’s Italy, Trieste was originally a Roman garrison town, and later dominated by the Venetians during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1382 the city placed itself under the control of the Hapsburgs, who in turn created Trieste as a free port in 1719. The Austro-Hungarian Empire needed an outlet to the sea, and Trieste’s location on the northern Adriatic made it the central access the Hapsburgs had to the advantages that water could bring for trade. In the last half of the eighteenth century the population increased from 6,433 in 1758 to between 20,000 and 24,000 around 1800. Not only was Trieste an accessible harbor for the Hapsburgs, Emperor Joseph II had also succeeded in transforming a small settlement into one of the great seaports in the world: “When Austria lost its north Italian provinces in 1859, Trieste became the empire’s principal Mediterranean port.”⁶ In the late nineteenth century, Trieste was “the world’s seventh busiest port, and second in the Mediterranean after Marseilles,”⁷ ahead of both Genoa and Barcelona. Trieste’s population jumped again over the course of the nineteenth century, and was “close to 180,000 at the start of the twentieth.”⁸ By 1910, the Triestine numbers, according to another authority, approached 220,000. We are told that “goods shipped to Europe from every continent were marked Via Trieste. The city came to be known as the ‘third entrance to the Suez Canal’ because so much traffic flowed from there to and from Asia.”⁹ Besides Trieste having five theatres, the 1909 presence of some twenty-one movie houses in Trieste prompted Joyce to try opening a movie theatre in Dublin, where it failed.

It was not just the Slavic and Italian that jostled together in Trieste, bordering what we now think of as the old Yugoslavia (in reality Slovenia), once run by Tito, but the Hapsburgs had succeeded in implementing in Trieste an unusual Enlightenment policy of religious toleration. Catholics, Orthodox Greeks, Protestants, and Jews were able to live together harmoniously; at the edge of the Balkans Trieste became “a cosmopolitan center that attracted diverse non-Catholic religious-ethnic minorities: Jews, Greek and Serbian orthodox, Protestants, and Armenians.”¹⁰ Around 1807 a French émigré aristocrat had written of Trieste to a merchant brother of his living there that “the past is dead”: “The city you have chosen for your new undertakings is the most suitable and certain for your success; it is the Philadelphia of Europe, the city typical of pioneers of our old continent, the port where the shipwrecked find welcome and a promising new life.”¹¹ Trieste could function that way thanks to Joseph II’s 1781 Patent of Toleration so that non-Catholics, including Lutherans, Calvinists and the Greek orthodox, were given formal tolerance. In the context of these non-Catholic Christians, cultured Sephardic Jews were able to flourish there, since they were more worldly than their eastern brethren. Just to begin to indicate how complicated a linguistic world it was, under the Hapsburgs the official language was Italian, spoken by most—even for business that could get carried on in German. “Most educated Triestines were trilingual”¹²—in German, Slovene, and the Triestine dialect. So Trieste was capable of becoming a unique European refuge. Freud went there himself from Vienna in order to pursue neurological research in 1876.

Although by 1900 Trieste was the third largest city, following Vienna and Prague, in the Hapsburg Empire, the outbreak of World War I in 1914 proved Trieste’s undoing, as well as the Hapsburgs with their 600-year-old Empire. After a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, their bodies were brought to Trieste by an Austro-Hungarian battleship. A funeral cortege through Trieste can be taken as the beginning of the end of the golden era of Trieste; aside from the illustriousness of its literature, no “great art galleries, museums, or monuments”¹³ would be left behind. With the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, Trieste lost its main raison d’être as a port and entered on a period of comparative decay. Although Trieste would become “a rich prize” when annexed to Italy, “it was not such an unqualified advantage for Trieste itself, since a political frontier now severed the Triestini from their German and Slav hinterland, leaving the city a head without a body and its inhabitants often without occupation.” The loss of natural trade routes led to Trieste’s decline.¹⁴

New countries were now carved out of the different nationalities of the old Hapsburg Empire—Hungary for example shrank to a fraction of its old size, and Vienna, instead of being the great imperial city, became a provincial capital of a small country known afterwards as Austria. Trieste (about a hundred miles to the east of Venice) first became part of the kingdom of Italy in 1918, and while remaining a free port was of no special strategic value, occupied in World War II by first the Nazis and then the Yugoslavs, until it finally was formally transferred to Italy in 1954. After the First World War Trieste became “a ghost of her pre-war self, commercially speaking…the Italian government had no intention of encouraging her at the expense of Venice.”¹⁵ Today Trieste, a secondary Italian port, is merely twice the size of New Haven, Connecticut.

Despite all its reduced standing starting after World War I, Trieste continues to symbolize a miraculous cultural era, one in which the Jews of Trieste, thanks to the existence of Greek merchants, were both able to help soften the power of the Catholic Church. Those exceptional years of Trieste’s flourishing still stand as one of those precious moments in history where assimilated Jews (like Svevo and Saba) inhabiting this commercial city had a precarious opportunity to contribute to the free life of the mind. In the pre-World War I period the Jewish Triestine population amounted to about 6,000 people, or approximately 4 percent of the total, who — loyal to the Hapsburgs — enjoyed a rather favored standing compared to elsewhere in the Empire. For Trieste, “which prided itself on its relatively independent status, was, unlike Austria, where anti-Semitism ran rampant, a city where Jews had known early emancipation, were respected, and enjoyed a leading role in the community.”¹⁶ (Trieste was then about a tenth of the size of Vienna’s two million, of which about 9 percent were Jewish.)

Weiss’s father, Ignazio (1859–1936), was a successful Jewish businessman who was born in Bohemia, in a town about a hundred miles from Vienna. He had first come to Trieste in his twenties, and became an “industrialist” with a factory, producing eating oil, that employed four hundred people. Edoardo’s mother, Fortuna (1867–1940), was, in contrast to her husband, a Jewish Italian of Sephardic origin, and a native of Trieste. Edoardo was the third child, the second son, of his parents’ eight children. Although Edoardo’s father was not lucky in getting a professional education, he was eager for his children to get higher training; two of Eduardo’s brothers got their Ph.D.’s, the oldest one in physics and the younger one in economics.

Weiss’s father also had belonged to the same B’nai B’rith lodge as Freud himself did, although the two men never met since Weiss’s family remained in Trieste; in Europe B’nai B’rith was a highly selective cultural organization, not necessarily religious, and Freud had sometimes brought a paper of his there to read. Edoardo emphasized how in the Old World B’nai B’rith was almost a secret society, unlike what later became the case in America.

Edoardo was raised in a multi-lingual family; at the age of six his governess, for example, spoke in German. From his “early years” Edoardo Weiss said he was interested in the natural sciences, and while still attending the gymnasium (classical high school) getting an education he made the decision to study medicine, already with an eye on eventually becoming a psychiatrist. He first read Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 1905–1907; the bookseller in a mix-up ordered instead of the dream book Freud’s relatively minor “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,” about a novella by Wilhelm Jensen, but both texts made an enduring impression on him. (Freud’s Gradiva study was partly written to please Jung.) Weiss read both works before going to Vienna to study in 1908; he enrolled in the medical school of the University of Vienna, then still a natural center of cultural life for someone from Trieste, which did not yet have a university of its own. Weiss was already interested in psychology, and thought it would be a good idea to have an analysis. He had decided to study psychiatry before meeting Freud.

Although Weiss was fully aware of the hostility among the leading Viennese professors towards Freud’s teachings, in early October 1908 he visited Freud, then fifty-two years old, to ask for his advice about how Weiss could be trained in psychoanalysis. Freud had started assembling his own circle of followers in 1902. During that 1908 interview Freud inquired about Weiss’s background and personal life; Freud had asked the young man “whether he was satisfied with himself,” and Freud then inquired into the nature of the “personal troubles” that he had. Weiss implied that there was nothing very striking here, and that his own difficulties were within the range of what could be expected. Evidently Weiss was shy, “bashful,” and mainly had youthful “inhibitions” and some “obsessive” symptoms.

At that time Freud was already beginning to adv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Trieste
• 2. Chicago
• 3. The Case of Frank
• 4. Pioneering Under Mussolini
• 5. Discipleship and Federn
• 6. An Interview with Kurt Eissler
• 7. The Psychoanalytic Family
• 8. Clinical Moralism
• 9. Politics
• 10. Tolerance and Loyalty
• Afterwards
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• llustrations follow page