ABSTRACT
Vittorio Benussi was born on 17 January 1878 in Trieste, at that time an unruly province of the Habsburg Empire, to Bernardo and Maria Rizzi. The Dizionario enciclopedico degli italiani reports that his father attended the universities of Padua, Vienna and Graz before becoming a teacher of history at lycées in Capodistria and Trieste. Benussi was always reluctant to express himself in theoretical terms, preferring instead to speak through the results of his experiments. The first phase of Benussi's analysis of the perception of form lasted from his 1901 dissertation on the Zollner illusion to his studies published at the end of the decade on the combination of figures of apparent movement. Benussi's first work on temporal apprehension dates to the beginning of the century. Benussi's book published in 1925, Suggestione e ipnosi nell'nnalisi psichica reale, a summary of which he had already presented at the Congress of 1923, is a masterpiece of experimental descriptive psychology.
