Freud and Italy

Learning about the eternal laws of life…in the Eternal City would not be a bad combination.

S. Freud, Letter to Fliess dated 27 August 1899

Rome will host the 26th International Congress of Psychoanalysis next July. The fact that for the first time this scientific event is to take place on Italian soil will recall to the minds of all psychoanalysts the not negligible role that this country and its capital played in the life of Sigmund Freud.

The twenty-five congresses held since 1908 have followed each other every two years, with rare exceptions, the regularity of the meetings being interrupted only by the two world wars. The practice adopted from the early days by Freud and his older pupils was observed with such great respect in subsequent times that it rose to the rank of a veritable tradition. Thus we may safely say that, although Freud passed away almost thirty years ago, his presence continues to hover over every congress, so much so that he is almost materially evoked by his daughter Anna, currently Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

Within the ambit of such ideal continuity, the Rome Congress will undoubtedly take on for many attendees the guise of a real pilgrimage to places that held great emotional significance for Freud. However, this consideration is not to be taken for a conservationist aspiration to see the psychoanalytical establishment recognised merely as a result of the passing of the decades.

On the contrary, I believe that the mystification of Freud is a risk to be avoided and that the best means to this end is to get to know his personality as deeply and objectively as possible. The relationship between Freud and Italy and, in particular, the influence that his experiences in Italy had on him represent, in my opinion, one of the still neglected chapters of his life. The biographies of Freud have gone no farther than to record his passion for Italian art or to put forward partial interpretations of the emotional signifi