"Black" and "Jew": Race and the Resistance to Psychoanalysis in Italy (Report‪)‬

I. Resistance and Race Psychoanalysis, and in particular, the concept of the unconscious, have traditionally met with a certain resistance in Italian culture. Although Freud's work was embraced by Jewish intellectuals in Trieste before the war, and later even by an idealist like Croce as Jennifer Stone has noted, at the level of a broader (bourgeois or popular) discourse or practice psychoanalysis found primary opposition in the developments of philosophical positivism, and in the Church. (1) It would appear senseless to consider the peculiarity of the so-called analytic situation in Italy without at least noting its ambiguous relation with confession, for example. As a "Jewish" mode of confession, analysis reduces the speaker to a weak being before a castigating god; this leads not to redemption, but to a continual agitation, skepticism, abstraction. Even during the 1950s when the Church felt compelled to recognize the good works of Italian psychiatry (Italy has been in the forefront of social and institutional programs to treat the mentally ill), the Vatican insisted upon the juridical and moral priority of confession over the analyst-client privilege. (2) In addition to the peculiar influence of populist Catholic ideology, others factors shaping the historical antagonism toward Freudian thought in Italy include the political developments of Fascism, and the relatively retarded formation of the Italian bourgeoisie.