One of the author interviewing techniques with Edoardo Weiss was to read him the names of members of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society from the 1930s. In France too the reception of psychoanalysis was held back on the grounds that Freud was part of an alien German influence; this aloofness was partially made possible by the excellence of the natively French neurological tradition. Within Italy, Weiss felt he had had two staunch supporters in Rome, both of whom came to him on the basis of the book of lectures that he published with Freud’s Preface: Servadio and Perrotti. Weiss subsequently analyzed them both, and arranged for them to become, like himself, members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Politically, Paul Federn was a Social Democrat, and as a therapist more optimistic than Freud; Federn was also more tolerant of the way people’s egos could need support.