Vittorio Benussi

a difficult life, a tragic fate

pp. 101-143

in: Mauro Antonelli, Vittorio Benussi in the history of psychology, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

He was an elegant-looking, lean person with a finely chiseled and melancholy face and a dry, sceptical smile. He went around in a black laboratory smock, and when he took a walk, he wore a black hat with a wide brim and puffed on a long black cigar. One year there was a student who often walked with him, much shorter but in exactly the same outfit. Benussi mostly worked in a darkened room, where he had a cot along with his apparatus, and he often spent the night as well as the day there. He did not give many courses, perhaps because his health was not good. I remember one course in which he used the students as subjects for a whole semester in an experiment on guessing the number of dots in a long series of patterns. He did this without giving us any idea of the purpose of the experiment. I finally rebelled and told him humbly that I would like to learn psychology from him. He was very friendly, gave me a key to the laboratory, and said that all the apparatus was at my disposal but that he did not have much time. (Heider 1970, p. 66)