Edith Kurzweil
LETTER FROM ABROAD:
PSYCHOANALYSTS ON THE COUCH
Every country adapts psychoanalysis to its own ends and,
in the process, rewrites the contributions of its own psychoanalytic
heroes.
In
fact, reevaluations of Freudian history currently are fash–
ionable in a number of European cities - to celebrate Freud's local
disciples, to inflate their own contributions to psychoanalytic lore
over those of all others, or to praise the openmindedness of the city
fathers . And where psychoanalysis was met with nothing but hostil–
ity, as for instance in France or Italy, some current emphases tend to
stress the strong psychiatric traditions which kept psychoanalysis at
bay, while others focus on the influence of Catholic morality.
In
other words, one sometimes gets the impression that psychoanalysis
is called in to elevate and boost local traditions . But everyone of the
current reinterpretations to a large extent relies on reminiscences and
anecdotes, in order to illuminate specific theoretical twists and turns.
Yet, even where the influences of the milieu are being exaggerated,
the media coverage of meetings on the subject serves, once more, to
spread psychoanalytic knowledge . This helps Freud's movement to
live on - albeit in unanticipated forms.
The adaptive qualities of psychoanalysis were particularly no–
ticeable at the recent meeting in Trieste on "The Culture of Psycho–
analysis: A Historic Review." The city, whose monuments-remind–
ing us of past glories during the Austro-Hungarian empire contrast
sharply with its "frontier" status, recently was celebrated as the home
of Italian psychoanalysis. For Edoardo Weiss, its native (Jewish)
son, was the only Italian disciple in close contact with Freud: Ettore
Schmitz, we recall, immortalized him in his novel,
The Confessions of
Zeno.
These were the reasons why psychoanalytic historians got to–
gether to recall not only the circumstances of Weiss's and Schmitz's
lives , but also Italian resistance to psychoanalysis, and particularly
the Fascists' attitudes, which forced Weiss's move to Rome in
1932
and to Chicago in
1939 .
The writer Giorgio Voghera and a number
of Italian psychoanalysts - among them Cesare Musatti who had been
one of the founders of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society in
1932-
attended both festivities and scholarly meetings. So we heard a great
deal about psychoanalytic theory and history and about applications
