Fascism becomes desire

on Freud, Mussolini and transnational politics

Federico Finchelstein

pp. 97-123

in: Joy Damousi, Mariano Ben Plotkin (eds), The transnational unconscious, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

In early 1933 Sigmund Freud received an inconvenient visitor. The visitor was Giovachino Forzano, a renowned fascist opera composer and a personal friend of Benito Mussolini. Forzano's daughter was a patient of Edoardo Weiss, the noted Italian psychoanalyst. A Freudian loyalist, Weiss wanted Freud's personal supervision of the case and he went to the Austrian capital taking with him his patient and her fascist father. The three distinctive individuals showed up at Freud's home on Berggasse 19 on April 26, 1933 and the fascist Forzano asked Freud to dedicate one of his books to Mussolini.²

Cited authors

Freud Sigmund