The Remote Origins of Psychoanalysis in Italy: Modernism and the Psyche in Florence, 1903-1915

MAURO PASQUALINI

Culturas psi

IDES

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2012 vol. 0 p. 5 - 21

2313-965x

The article studies the reception of psychoanalysis by a circle of young intellectuals in pre-war Florence. It focuses on Roberto Assagioli, the first Italian psychiatrist to show commitment to the psychoanalytic movement, and explores his relationship to Florentine modernist reviews of the time. The article argues that important Italian authors such as Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini embraced expectations about the studies on the unconscious, while maintaining an ambivalent relationship with the most recent developments in psychology. The result was that the Florentine cultural context presented both possibilities and limitations for psychoanalysis. On the one hand, it became a scenario for spreading information and promoting psychoanalytic ideas. On the other hand, some ideas and attitudes ?romantic and mystic notions of interior life, obsession with reinforcing will and producing a cultural and moral re-awakening?became serious limits for a long-lasting and deep engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis.