Is There an Unconscious in This Text? On Italo Svevo's "La Coscienza di Zeno"

As scholarship unanimously acknowledges, "La coscienza di Zeno" (1923) is Italy’s first ‘psychoanalytic novel’, wherein Freud’s discipline is employed both as a thematic motif and as a narrative device. However, as the title itself suggests, rather than representing the dominion of the unconscious dimension over the Ego, "La coscienza di Zeno" seems to enact the protagonist’s conscious rethinking and strategic re-elaboration of his life. My paper asks whether Zeno’s unconscious constitutes an underlying presence within the book’s narrative or if, on the contrary, "La coscienza" superficially displays a set of psychoanalytic motifs while getting rid of psychoanalysis’ most perturbing discovery. Goal of this analysis is to read Svevo’s novel as the first, paradigmatic, example of a peculiar resistance to the very notion of unconscious characterising the context of national culture. Concurrently, my paper interprets the book as a first attempt to transform psychoanalysis’ inward twist into an extroverted discourse, a tendency that would recur in most of the approaches to Freud’s teaching in Italy.