Edoardo Weiss: The House That Freud Built (review)

In his long career as historian of the psychoanalytic movement, Paul Roazen interviewed more people who had known Sigmund Freud than any contemporary historian. Having started with Freud, Political and Social Thought (1968), he next wrote about the controversial analyst Victor Tausk. Then came the fruit of his many interviews, the indispensable Freud and His Followers (1975), published thirty-six years after Freud's death. Prior to the present book, he wrote a full biography of Helene Deutsch (1985); book-length critical studies of Sandor Rado (1995) and of Edward Glover and Melanie Klein (2000); and many articles and reviews.

Edoardo Weiss (1889–1970) emigrated from Italy, where he was known as the first psychoanalyst, to Chicago on the eve of World War II. He had practiced in Trieste, his home city, and Rome, having spent years in Vienna for his medical education and analysis with Paul Federn. Respected by Freud, he was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He compiled a small book based on his correspondence with Freud mostly about clinical matters, Sigmund Freud as a Consultant (1970). Roazen had a dozen interviews with Weiss in Chicago starting in 1965, most lasting several hours, and has long anticipated writing this book.

Small but rich, the book has a relaxed, conversational tone. Some editing to reduce occasional ambiguity and awkwardness would have helped, but not more formality. The writing engages in a personal way: "I think that [Ernest] Jones, who was in general overly impressed by powerful leaders, was probably also taken in by some fantasies of Freud's own that Mussolini was particularly concerned to protect him in Vienna" (p. 36). A chapter is devoted to experiences relating to the Italian dictator; others focus on Trieste, Chicago, "Discipleship and Federn," cases, and "Clinical Moralism," Roazen's apt phrase for Freud's posture as an analyst and supervisor whose articulate bias for and against certain types of patients goes far beyond transference (unconscious bias toward or against a patient by the therapist).

Weiss and his wife, Wanda (also a therapist), lived apart, for which Roazen gives no explanation, although he interviewed their two sons. Roazen says that Weiss trusted him to respect privacy on certain matters, and this could be one of them. Weiss analyzed author Umberto Saba and other prominent Italians. The Trieste-based novelist Italo Svevo, whose novel Confessions of Zeno (1923) includes psychoanalytic themes and a character probably based on Weiss, was related by marriage to the psychiatrist; his case histories, on which Freud consulted, included some Weiss relatives in disguise. Weiss asked Freud if he should analyze his own son; Freud candidly answered in the negative, but said that in the case of his own daughter it worked. Thus Roazen first learned that Freud analyzed Anna—a breach of protocol that embarrassed the psychoanalytic establishment.

Much is compressed into this story—often in tidbits, but useful ones. Heinz Kohut and Franz Alexander were Chicago analysts who receive some attention here, along with earlier colleagues of Weiss such as Sandor Ferenczi, Anna Freud, Alfred Adler, Sandor Rado, and of course Federn, Jones, Tausk (his classmate), and the lesser-known Italian psychiatrists. The Freud-Weiss relationship provides insights on therapeutic vision and style, controversial judgments, Freud on Zionism, and psychoanalytic politics. Freud encouraged and praised harsh reviews by Weiss of an Italian colleague's faulty book on analysis. Without telling Weiss, Freud sent a positive greeting to the author he had roundly condemned, saying that any errors in the book would be offset by the good it would do for psychoanalysis; Weiss found out about this devious act much later.

While neither particularly rigorous nor methodical, this brief history will entertain and reward cognoscenti, while providing a heartfelt introduction to psychoanalytic history for those heretofore lacking the time or the courage to tackle more imposing tomes on the subject.