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This is a study of two novels, Confessions of Zeno and Further Confessions of Zeno, by Italo Svevo who prided himself on having introduced Freud into Italian literature. For Robison, the essence of Svevo's art lies in a delicate interplay between surface, external reality, and freudian depth. She examines the elements in the novels that make them both comic and truthful, discovering in both a pattern of Oedipal rebellion and guilt in which Zeno seems to be permanently fixated. This pattern is present in his relationship to his father and to a host of father-figures. It is comically present in Zeno's constant struggle to quit smoking—smoking being for him both a mode of rebellion and an assertion of sexual potency as well as guilt-producing. In addition, Robison finds Zeno to be obsessed with fantasies of patricide, fratricide, castration, impotence, and strong feelings of guilt, all of which, she concludes, reflect Svevo's reading of Freud. But the wit of the two novels and the appealing and thoroughly adapted side of Zeno himself reflect Svevo's ambivalence toward freudian ideas explaining everything about personality. The author states that this article is an investigation of Zeno's psychodynamics, not an attempt to deal with the whole world of the novel. As such an investigation, it is successful and sound.