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was an Italian analyst who remained in regular contact with Freud by mail and played an important role in the founding of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, but was nevertheless not one the major figures in the early history of psychoanalysis (although he was not a marginal figure like Sadger either). Born in Trieste, Weiss went to Vienna in the early years of the twentieth century to study medicine. Having already read The Interpretation of Dreams as well as ‘Delusions and dreams in Jensen's Gradiva’, he contacted Freud in 1908 when he was just 19 years old. From this contact a friendship developed that lasted until Freud's death.
From that first contact on, Weiss quickly immersed himself in the psychoanalytic milieu. He was analysed by Paul Federn in 1909, not by Freud (he could not afford the latter's fees), and by 1910 he was attending Freud's university lectures. He became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1913, even before he had finished his medical studies. During the First World War he remained in Vienna and only returned to Trieste in 1919, where he began to practise psychiatry in the psychiatric hospital. He gave up that position in 1927, after Mussolini came to power and Weiss refused to join the Fascist party (which was a precondition for working in the hospital). In 1931 he moved to Rome and succeeded in founding the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. By 1939, being a Jew, he embarked on a ship to the United States, where he began to work at the clinic of Karl Menninger before moving to Chicago in 1940. He remained there until his death in 1970.
Weiss has over 60 publications to his name, including books, book chapters and articles, many on clinical subjects (such as on agoraphobia) but he is best known in the history of psychoanalysis for three particular reasons. The first is that it is often assumed that he served as the model for the narrator-analyst in Italo Svevo's (1929) Confessions of Zeno (even though Svevo denied this identity). S