Edoardo Weiss

Edoardo Weiss was born in Trieste in 1889. Pupil of Sigmund Freud in Vienna, he brings
psychoanalysis to Italy. During the 1920s he works as psychoanalyst in his surgery in Via San Lazzaro 8 in Trieste; one of his patients is the great poet  Umberto Saba.

The intellectual elite in town, mainly of Jewish origin and open to novelties from Vienna, enthusiastically embrace the theories of Freud.

Freud was conscious of the link existing between psychoanalysis and Judaism, two factors closely connected in specific areas of research.

Unfortunately, members of the medical profession in Trieste are not much interested in psychoanalysis and Weiss moves to Rome. In 1932 he establishes the first Italian Society for Psychoanalysis and launches its review “Rivista italiana di psicoanalisi” which frequently suffers suspension by the obscurantism of the Church and Fascist authorities.

The laws “defence of the race” proclaimed in 1939 by the Fascist government force Weiss to emigrate from Italy to the United States where he treats psychosomatic and psychotic disorders and studies psychology of the ego.

His articles were published in both “Archivio generale di neurologia, psichiatria e psicoanalisi” and “Rivista italiana di psicoanalisi”. Edoardo Weiss dies in Chicago in 1970 soon after the publication of the book “Sigmund Freud come consulente”.