[Psychoanalysis is a precious thread, fragile but precious": Vittorio Benussi and the Inventory of psychoanalysis (1926-1927)].

Abstract

The lessons of psychoanalysis held by Vittorio Benussi in Padua between 1926 and 1927 reveal the other aspect of his interests: that which regards psychoanalysis and its method. These unpublished lessons, which we are printing here for the first time, are preserved in the historical Archives of Italian psychology of the Università di Milano-Bicocca. I have assigned to them the title of Inventario di psicanalisi (Inventory of Psychoanalysis) for their character, unprecedented in the Italy of the 1920s, of a first record of the lexical and theoretical world of psychoanalysis. Since they were not intended for publication, the lessons were written without the urgency of ordering facts and interpretations, and without resorting to the rhetoric of linguistic conventions. A reading of them makes evident how the Benussian attempt to integrate experimental psychology and analytic method is still unresolved. In these pages everything is shown in an incipient stage, in a contracted and intricate prose; while things are complicated by the hermetism of the style, the terminological oscillations, the theoretical density; and yet, these unpublished notes should be read like a palimpsest in which each word has been written, erased, and rewritten, in a work that remains unique in twentieth-century European psychology.