ABSTRACT
Ferro’s career and international reputation need to be seen in relation to the particular ‘parabola’ (Conci 2019, p. 462) of the history of Italian psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis entered Italy by way of Trieste – which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until it joined Italy at the end of the First World War – thanks to two psychiatrists, Marco Levi Bianchini and Edoardo Weiss. Weiss had studied in Vienna, met Freud and been analysed by Paul Federn. Despite Freud’s personal love of Italy (he made 20 visits) and his identification of it as the ‘locus of the unconscious’ (Haddad and Haddad 1995), psychoanalysis was relatively slow to take root in the peninsular. There are several possible reasons for this: the powerful opposition of Catholic culture; the pervasive influence, since the late nineteenth century, of the idealist, anti-positivist philosophy of Benedetto Croce and his followers; and the dominance, in psychiatry, of the organicist thinking of Cesare Lombroso and his theory of ‘psychic degeneration’ (Civitarese and Ferro 2020, pp. 110–111, and see Caldwell 2016, p. 679 et seq.).
