Emilio Servadio

The contribution aims to deepen the "in motion" biography of Emilio Servadio, who was forced to emigrate to India in 1938 following the racial laws, and is inserted into the broader project: "Intellectuals fleeing Fascist Italy. Migrants, exiles, and refugees for political or racial reasons." Along this direction, the scholar's biography will be analyzed, focusing on his exile, return to Italy, and scientific journeys that saw him participate in major psychoanalysis and parapsychology congresses. Emilio Servadio's biography reveals the profile of a versatile scholar, passionate about music, theater, poetry—he was a poet himself—close to the avant-garde, Eastern culture, yoga, tantra, and esoteric research, with active participation in the Roman Lodges of the Grand Orient of Italy. Servadio was initially interested in hypnosis, trained on Freud's works, and underwent didactic analysis with Weiss, contributing to the founding and dissemination of psychoanalysis in Italy even during fascism, when it was opposed and criticized on many cultural, scientific, and political fronts. He conducted original studies on countertransference and the role of pre-oedipal conflicts. He addressed sexology, freeing homosexuality from its psychopathological dimension and, in some ways, anticipating feminist movements when speaking of female eroticism in a still patriarchal culture. Servadio was also a rigorous scholar of phenomena that lacked a rational explanation. So-called paranormal phenomena that escaped consciousness could be studied at the university using experimental methods. A red thread can be traced in his vast scientific production and the multiplicity of his interests: a constant interest in studying human consciousness and its modifications. Exceptional states of consciousness that he explored and experienced through hypnosis, dreams, trance, yogic practices, and LSD consumption.