Sergio Benvenuto Basaglia’s Effect

so too many of the psychoanalysts affiliated with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’s Child Guidance Center pursued the idea of equitable treatment by extending their practice into the community. Anna Freud, August Aichhorn, Siegfried Bernfeld, and Willi Hoffer were among the second generation of Viennese psychoanalysts, all affiliated with the Social Democratic Party and each an activist in their own way, who took to heart Freud’s 1918 demand for mental health care as a social right. They offered cost-free psychoanalysis in the schools, in the large communities of public housing, and in Vienna’s networks of health advisory centers. At the same time, alliances between health reformers, educators, and psychoanalysts fostered a system that would enhance the autonomous human voice from childhood to society. They believed that early childhood services would remedy traditional authoritarian repression and allow for the emergence of “a free and self-reliant human being” (A. Freud, 1930/1974a). With a methodology grounded in social rights and infused with the energy of interwar social democracy, psychoanalytic practice was, at least until 1938, significantly more public than conventional narratives would have us believe. z

REFERENCES

Barnett, W. P., & Woywode, M. (2004). From red Vienna to the Anschluss: Ideological competition among Viennese newspapers during the rise of National Socialism. The American Journal of Sociology, 109(6), 1452-1499.

Coles, R. (1991). Anna Freud: The dream of psychoanalysis. Addison Wesley.

Die Stunde. (September 16, 1928). In Folder “Psychoanalysis & Socialism, 1926-29-1937”, Container 7, papers of Siegfried Bernfeld, Collections of the Manuscript Division, U.S. Library of Congress.

Eitingon, M. (2009a). [Letter No. 142 E of 25 November 1919 from Max Eitingon to Sigmund Freud]. In Michael Schröter (Ed.) and Olivier Mannoni (Trans.), Correspondance (1906-1939) (p. 195). Hachette Littératures.

Eitingon, M. (2009b). [Letter No. 152 E of 25 November 1919 from Max Eitingon to Sigmund Freud]. In Michael Schröter (Ed.) and Olivier Mannoni (Trans.), Correspondance (1906-1939) (p. 141). Hachette Littératures.

Freud, A. (1951). August Aichhorn: July 27, 1878-October 17, 1949. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 32, 53.

Freud, A. (1966). Indications for child analysis. In The Writings of Anna Freud, Vol. 4 (p. 5). International Universities Press. (Original work published 1945)

Freud, A. (1974a). Four lectures on psychoanalysis for teachers and parents. In The writings of Anna Freud, Vol. 1 (p. 127). International Universities Press. (Original work published 1930)

Freud, A. (1974b). Normality and pathology in childhood. In The Writings of Anna Freud, Vol. 6 (p. 127). International Universities Press. (Original work published 1968)

Freud, A. (2006). [Letter # 152-A of January 25, 1924 to Lou Andreas-Salomé]. À l’ombre du père – Correspondance 1919-1937 (p. 234). Hachette Littératures.

Freud, S. (1955). Lines of advance in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In J. Strachey (Ed. And Trans.), Standard edition (Vol. 17, pp. 157-168). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1919)

Friedjung, J. K. (1924). A dream of a child of six. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 5, 362-363.

Friedjung, J. K. (1937). Report on the First International Congress of Child Psychiatry, Paris, France, July 24 to Aug. 1, 1937. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 37(5), 1171.

Goldstein, J., Freud, A., & Solnit, A. (1980). Before the best interests of the child. Burnett Books.

Hitschmann, E. (January 1927). [Document dated January 1927 from the Archiv des Psychoanalytischen Ambulatoriums Wien]. Archives of the Freud Museum.

Hoffer, W. (1932). Der ärztliche Berater. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Pädagogik, VI, 496-504.

Maderthaner, W., & Musner, L. (2003). Outcast Vienna: The politics of transgression. International Labor and Working Class History, 64, 25-37.

Rabinbach, A. (1978). Politics and pedagogy: The Austrian social democratic youth movement 1931-32. Journal of Contemporary History, 13(2), 337–356. https://doi. org/10.1177/002200947801300209

Sterba, E. (1933). Die Angst habe ich liebe. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Pädagogik, 7(2), 45-82.

Sterba, E. (1941). The school and child guidance. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 10, 445-467.

Basaglia’s Effect Sergio BENVENUTO

Franco Basaglia (1924-1980) is definitely the Italian psychiatrist—of those no longer alive—who is best known to the Italians; he is one of the Italian psychiatrists best known in the world, together with Cesare Lombroso, Bruno Tanzi, Ugo Cerletti and Ugo Bini.1 Everyone—or almost everyone—in Italy knows that Basaglia inspired the “180 law,” approved in 1978, the law that abolished the lunatic asylums. In fact, the law is known as the “Basaglia law.” In Italy, he enjoys the same mythic status that Philippe Pinel still does in France: the enlightened doctor who freed the mentally ill from their shackles. When he was alive, however, his notoriety went way beyond the borders of Italy. In Spain and Latin American countries, he became the point of reference for anti-institutional psychiatry.

Despite this notoriety, however, his thoughts and the meaning of his practical actions—and those of his followers, still active and organized in the society Psichiatria Democratica (Democratic Psychiatry)—are usually widely misunderstood, even in Italy.

1.

I was regularly in Franco Basaglia’s company over a couple of months as a student of psychology at University VII Paris in 1971, during my psychiatric internship at the Psychiatric Hospital of Trieste, of which he was already the director.

That year, I knew that Basaglia had come to Paris to hold a lecture, and I hastened to invite him to speak at the Italian Home at the Cité Universitaire, where I was in charge of the cultural programs. He came, and many people were there to listen to him. It was clear that Basaglia was well known in France; the French translation of his book L’istituzione negata (The Negated Institution) had made quite an impression in that country. The translator was somewhat embarrassed because Basaglia didn’t avoid the language of obscenity when he wanted to explain what he meant, even when he was quoting Nietzsche and Artaud.

At that time, I knew the Clinique de la Borde, near Blois, for psychotic patients. La Borde, directed by Jean Oury and enlivened by the work of Félix Guattari, was the sanctuary of “institutional psychotherapy”; everyone in France knew it as the paradigm of a different sort of psychiatry. I found La Borde an enchanting place, despite the human suffering that was lodged there. A castle enshrouded in the most beautiful wood, where horses bounded about. For Basaglia, however, La Borde needed to be destroyed, precisely because it was an institution. His project was conceived as an absolutely anti-institutional one.

I took advantage of the occasion to ask Basaglia whether he could accept me for an internship at the psychiatric hospital in Trieste, of which he was the director for a short while. He introduced to me Michele Zanetti, President of the Province of Trieste. Zanetti had given him carte blanche in Trieste: he had the power to change the psychiatric system of the Trieste county completely. Without Zanetti, a right-leaning Christian Democrat, Basaglia couldn’t have been Basaglia. And it is a paradox that the “destruction”—as he put it—of the hospital in Trieste should have been possible thanks to the far-sightedness of a Christian Democrat politician. Zanetti agreed that I could come to Trieste.

2.

I remained for a couple of months, in the spring of 1971, at the San Giovanni Hospital of Trieste (closed years later by Basaglia’s successor, Franco Rotelli). I participated intensely in the life of an institution that was still a traditional lunatic asylum, of the kind that no longer exists in Italy (I hope). Some wards were upsetting: the patients wandered around

like ghosts or larvae in their rough asylum uniforms, and, like zombies, they pounced, ravenous with curiosity and even with libidinousness, on those who, like me, came from Outside. The women in the wards for the most extreme cases had shaved heads or extremely short hair, as in the Nazi concentration camps. I was struck by a woman who was unable to speak, but seemed an agitated little animal, twirling around me to touch me: the head of ward told me that she was in this condition because a psychiatrist had had her lobotomized when she was four!

Although I too was dazzled by Basaglia’s growing fame, I already, at that time, did not attach myself to his school of thought. I had said to him clearly and bluntly that I was a supporter of psychoanalysis, and that I appreciated the institutional psychotherapy of La Borde. In his view, on the other hand, there was no sense in replacing psychiatric institutions with better institutions—more open, more democratic, less repressive: a curative institution was for him a contradiction in terms. And yet, even though I was not on his wavelength, I was impressed by the man. In particular, I appreciated his ability to enter into contact with the patients directly and competently. It was evident that he had excellent training in classic psychiatry: when ambiguous patients were admitted, in whose cases there was a doubt as to whether they were even, in fact, psychotics, it was usually Basaglia who gave the diagnosis, which would then be shown to be correct.

His director’s office was always open, and I took advantage of this to speak with him often. He had me participate in meetings in private houses, reserved for “conspirators”: that is, for those psychiatrists whom he had brought to Trieste precisely to dismantle the hospital. He spoke with scorn and irritation of some old psychiatrists at the hospital who tried to jump on the new bandwagon. He and his team lived for the hospital even when they weren’t physically there; they dined talking about the hospital, they went to the cinema thinking about the hospital…The day was punctuated by continuous meetings and consultations: with the patients, with the nurses, among the psychiatrists from specific wards, among the psychiatrists from the whole hospital. These assemblies were not so much in order to take decisions, I should say that they were decision. The work of those involved was massive because all or almost all felt themselves protagonists of a historic event, of an epochal transformation.

The first day, he said to me, “You will feel ill at ease here! Because here we don’t function in psychoanalytic mode.” Did I in fact feel bad or good? Let’s say that I was too busy experiencing and learning to realize that I felt ill at ease. In this way, I understood what Basaglians were aiming at.

Their intention, fundamentally ethico-political, took as its starting point a sort of basic philosophical assumption: to contest Technique in psychiatry. Even if they admitted that psychiatry had to have recourse to skills and techniques. This demonization of Technique, behind which was sketched a diffidence in confronting science in general, was derived from Basaglia’s exquisitely phenomenological culture. Husserl, Binswanger, Medard Boss, Minkowski, Szilasi, etc. were the horizon within which he thought of mental illness. Psychoanalysis too was excluded inasmuch as it was a technique. As a Basaglian proclaimed coram populo: “We reject all the technical system of psychiatry: from the miserable patient who rots away in the most fetid asylum to the beautiful, rich, blonde, blue-eyed young man who goes to a psychoanalyst three times a week.” Psychoanalysis is, for Basaglia and his followers, a practice for the well-off, but objectively it’s still a

technique. And yet, certain psychiatric techniques were used at Trieste. From which the dynamic contradiction of Basaglia’s doctrine follows: how can psychiatrists, people of technique, cure in a manner beyond Technique? One day, Basaglia said to me, “I am convinced that electroshock treatment works in many cases; for example, in serious melancholy. But we don’t use it here because of its violent and repressive connotations.” He took a dim view of the fact that even at La Borde, they used electroshock treatment. It was not the efficacy of electroconvulsive therapy that was in question, however, but its aura of violence. And yet, at Trieste they used many psychopharmaceutical drugs, which at the time were in their early stages of development, and so I cheekily asked him, “You are against all technique? But not against pharmaceutical technique.” He replied that psychopharmaceuticals were a help in overcoming the segregation of patients in asylums. And I riposted, “But perhaps psychotherapeutic techniques, including psychoanalysis, can help to overcome segregation in asylums.” I don’t remember what he replied. Today, I believe that Basaglia accepted the use of pharmacological techniques (unlike the American psychiatrist Loren Mosher, who cured psychotics without any drugs) because they seemed to him mere tools, objects, whilst other “techniques,” such as psychoanalysis, were surrounded by “ideological” haloes, as he would have said. Psychoanalysis seemed to him to be incompatible with his work precisely because psychoanalysis wasn’t simply “a technique.” At Trieste, I realized how much the progressive elimination of psychiatric hospitals—and not only in Italy—owed something to the invention of psychopharmaceutical drugs that worked to some extent. Psychiatrists could avoid putting patients in straitjackets, or imprisoning them in padded cells, because a pill “restrains” the patients so much better than a straitjacket or a padded cell. The histories of psychopharmacology and of the deinstitutionalization of mental patients are indissolubly linked. The chemical asylum has replaced the physical asylum.

Some of the Basaglians at Trieste were charming and noteworthy people, and I became their friend. But some of them were Marxists of a rather priggish kind. During the years after 1968, a certain revolutionary schematism was de rigueur. One thing, however, was clear to them: theirs was not anti-psychiatry. Nor was there on their part any intention of inventing a “new psychiatry,” a new science; their action was purely anti-institutional in its aims. Often at Trieste, there arrived as visitors shoals of militants of the Revolution whose leitmotiv was ‘”Down with the old psychiatry! Here at Trieste is practiced the true science, the new psychiatry!” These were at once disowned and often openly derided by the Trieste team. Over the following years, I have been able to ascertain the extent to which Basaglia’s project, despite his great popularity even after his death, has been little understood, above all by so many of those who claim to admire him. For example, many believe that Basaglia was the promoter of a sociogenetic theory of mental illness, according to which, one might say, we emerge as mad because the society in which we live is sick. Basaglia never uttered these banalities; he knew that the mad had always existed, in every society and social class.

His fundamental idea is that we should respond to the true needs of the patients. But what were these true needs? At the time, French intellectuals on the left spoke always of desire—liberating desire, Deleuzian desiring machines. Italian intellectuals on the left, on the other hand, spoke always of needs, which seemed less ethereal than desires. Basaglia said to me once that a true need of the patients was to have lavatory paper, not coated or pink lavatory paper; these would be “ideological needs,” not true needs. The desire for refined lavatory paper could indeed lead

…a true need of the patients was to have lavatory paper, not coated or pink lavatory paper; these would be “ideological needs,” not true needs. The desire for refined lavatory paper could indeed lead to intestinal disorders, he said: “even a diarrhoea can be ideological.”

to intestinal disorders, he said: “even a diarrhoea can be ideological.” This affair of ideological diarrhea made quite an impression on me. After all, any neurotic symptom, for a Marxist phenomenologist such as he was, expresses an ideological need. But why should the need for basic lavatory paper be a true need? Why not use water, renouncing even lavatory paper? For Taoists and for the Greek Cynic philosophers, the need for any object would be inessential, “ideological.” Apart from the bowl, the only thing that they might use—but Diogenes the Cynic discarded even that. In short, from what moment onwards do manufactured goods satisfy a real need or create desires, that is, ideological needs? The dividing line between need, on the one hand—as a desire that it is legitimate to satisfy—and desires, on the other hand, is always, historically, in a state of flux. Today, high-tech comfort—mobile phones, cars, computer, internet, etc.—is the bowl that we can’t throw away. I am struck by the fact that today the youngest people around ask themselves how older people, even ten or twenty years ago, could stand to pass the summer without air conditioning. For them, air conditioning has become almost a primary need. (I do have to confess that it has always been that for me, too, even when I was young.)

Basaglia seemed a man devoured by the need to act, and he was certainly an irritable person. Even with me, he once became utterly furious because I had posed some objection or other to his strategy of deinstitutionalization of mental patients. His very ocular tics expressed his impatience, his haste. But at bottom, Basaglia was above all an extremely cultured intellectual, passionate about art, who had forced himself to become a great reformer. Paraphrasing Marx, it is as though one might say, “Until now the great phenomenological psychiatrists have described madness, the point today is to change it.”

The Basaglia law was the Italian trajectory of a process of freeing mental patients from the asylums, which set its mark upon the whole of the West from the seventies onwards. Backing community care, cures in the community. And every culture has had its vociferous advocates of this policy: Thomas Szasz in America, Ronald Laing and David Cooper in Great Britain, Félix Guattari in France…We have had Basaglia, one of the best.

I have always been a friend of Sergio Piro, a Neapolitan like me, known as the “Basaglia of the South” because he was Director of the Democratic Psychiatric Association in the Italian Mezzogiorno. Piro didn’t have certain ideological asperities—and asperities of personality—like Basaglia had. He was an elegant intellectual, passionate above all about linguistics, and he didn’t cast an anathema over psychoanalysis; psychoanalysts of important standing came out of his school. His most important book is Il linguaggio schizofrenico (The Language of Schizophrenia) (Piro, 1967). I found him an extraordinary man. A short while before he died, in 2009, he told me that in his view the 180 reform had failed. It had been applied to the letter but had been profoundly betrayed in spirit. It was only in one place in Italy that the sense of the 180 had been passed on, he said, in a local health service at Pordenone directed by a Lacanian psychiatrist, Francesco Stoppa.

3.

Paradoxically, Basaglia is famous for a reform that appears extremely simple: eliminating long-term psychiatric care, curing mental patients “in the territory” (“nel territorio”), as it was termed at the time. And yet the result of his action was the development of a highly sophisticated system of thought, which was hard to understand, not only for lots of psychiatrists, but also for lots of those who call themselves Basaglians. As I’ve said, his approach was in substance a critique of Technique in the name of what phenomenological philosophers call Lebenswelt, world-of-life.

The element in technique that horrifies the revolutionary phenomenologist—and in science, to the extent that it is a technique of knowledge—is its power of separation. Technique, essentially, is separation: in general, separation of the agent from the product of her or his action. Today, this denunciation of technique goes back at least to Plato; Socrates hates the idea of leaving books behind him precisely because the book survives its author, it is an inert, artificial product of a living subject. If one poses a question to a book, it doesn’t respond, Socrates said. What has been predicted, from Plato to Edmund Husserl and right up to certain post-modern authors (such as Gilles Deleuze), is seeing the advent of productions that don’t separate themselves from their producer or author. If today the world-of-life is thought of phenomenologically as tension, movement, dynamics, then technique becomes, on the contrary, the operation that divides, encapsulates in a stasis, and isolates an alienated product. Against poiesis, the production of things or institutions, phenomenologists exalt praxis, pure action as an end in itself, expressing the agent. In this way, the asylum is thought of by Basaglia either as the product of technique or as a machine (hence a technique) for separating. This separation is consumed at various levels: the asylum doesn’t just separate the patient from the living, integral social community, but also separates the inmates among themselves. It sharply separates the psychiatric doctor from the patients; within itself, the world of healers is hierarchically organized, and hierarchy is a form of separation. The wards, moreover, are separated from each other. Basaglia interpreted the world of the hospital in a radical manner as the application of the form of technocratic life to that from which, insofar as we are vital and eccentric, we flee.

The practice of Basaglia’s team, however, was based on the promotion of a form of liberating agitation: “creating movement.” The wards were made to communicate amongst each other, and as part of this same project, the doors of the hospital were opened and a growing osmosis between hospital, surrounding area and city was encouraged. Spaces were opened: not only physical spaces, but also spaces of social initiative and of animation. Later, vociferous artists and theater people came to collaborate at Trieste, attracted by the popularity of the experiment. There followed from this the famous epoch of Marco Cavallo (Marco Horse), a walking statue, who symbolized liberation from the asylum. “Get people to circulate.” In short, the free circulation of the world-of-life as temporality and fluidity was set in opposition to the hospital of old. In fact, Basaglia denied that the institution of the hospital—or any institution—could have a history. The psychiatric hospital, as a product of psychiatry understood as science-technique, is estranging and expropriating—without a history. At the time, all the clocks of the San Giovanni hospital were stopped; not a single one was working. It was as though the institution was closing down astronomical time. It was a fixed feature of almost all the clocks in asylums at the time: they were stopped. For Basaglia, therefore, the psychiatric hospital was an institution that exemplified the technical universe: the patients, human flotsam, were the throng that society had separated from itself, set outside of itself, in a long repression of its own vital being and visual prospect (in Italian, it is vi(s)ta: life and view). The asylum was a product which that technical society refused to recognize as its own: a shameful by-product of a technoscientific society. But wasn’t this a way of getting that sociogenetic theory of madness that seemed to have been thrown out of the door to come back in by the window? Not really, because at bottom, Basaglia thought that the cause of madness was, precisely, Technique as separation from the world-of-life, and so a technique could not in its turn be a cure.

4.

On the one hand, Basaglia denounced the psychiatric hospital and the old psychiatry as “non-curative.” At the time, he convinced the Italians that a patient in the asylums would definitely not get cured, but only deposited, kept under surveillance, and incarcerated (a claim that was substantially true). Today, most people interpret this

denunciation as meaning that Basaglia was proposing a real cure. But, as we have seen, on the other hand, he contested the various cures available, from shock therapy to interpersonal psychotherapy, as more or less camouflaged figures of Technique. And yet Basaglia thought that mental patients should be truly cured. Cured in the sense of care or of cure? If every cure is revealed as a technocratic Alienation, what care can be offered to those who are suffering? How can this contradiction be escaped?

Basaglia seemed to count on the fact that curing patients from the asylum—destroying in this way not only the asylum, but any institution that might have taken its place—would also be a cure for psychosis. But this certainly didn’t imply an absurd theory along the lines of “mental patients are made into mental patients by the asylum.” Basaglia obviously knew that people mainly become mad outside the asylum. But he thought that, precisely to the extent that he was renouncing every technique of cure (apart from psychopharmaceuticals), he would be able to arrive at the kernel of cure, that is, to cure the subject of that separation in which, at least in part, the illness consists. He thought, in short, that mental illnesses are double; on the one hand, there is the true illness—the origin and nature of which he was wary of articulating—and on the other hand, there is the “double” of this. The theme of the Double certainly came to him from Antonin Artaud, the psychotic poet. Basaglia, then, saw mental illness as, on the one hand, a product of the technical division of subjectivity, and on the other, the double that technique has made of madness itself. The madness that he was confronting was the double that technocratic society has made of it, segregating it not only physically in some hospital or other, but also scientifically—in some DSM, for example, today—separating it conceptually from the stream of life. For him, the priority was the cure of the double of the illness, before that of the illness itself.

We have said that plurality and fragmentation were for Basaglia the double. The double of that which for a revolutionary phenomenologist was lived reality, the experience of life as Erlebnis. The technocratic, duplicative separation of life from itself—which deprives of sense both life and the suffering that is part of life—produces something that we can only live as shit.

Scatological metaphors proliferated in Basaglia’s discourse. For example, the inmates of the psychiatric hospital were referred to as social rubbish or excrement; his insult of preference was “shit.” In fact, technocratic knowledge-power, to the extent that it creates fragmented forms, inevitably excludes, rejects, and segregates something that therefore descends into an excremental real. Technoscience is continually summoned to manage that which it has repressed, and so for that very reason produced, such as the psychiatric hospital.

But the point is: doesn’t every de-separating and de-technicalizing act in its turn, to the extent that it is “realized,” itself produce rejection effects? Doesn’t it tend to relapse into a state where it is itself double, an inert form? To rejoin full meaning—the flow of undivided life—is in fact always a prospect that is at best asymptotic: every act tends to halt at the threshold of real life. The Revolution is always somewhere beyond, afterwards, still to come, in other words, eschatological. In the present, at bottom, we have always and only to do with that shit of the double. We could say that outside the social scatology, there is only eschatology. This is the worm that gnaws at every phenomenological philosophy of life (even that of psychoanalysts seduced by phenomenology); you want to destroy the institutions, and they always reconstitute them-

selves spontaneously, as if life itself had an intrinsic predisposition to alienating itself, to fragmenting itself in separations, in depriving itself of vitality. And this is the case even if we are concerned with asylums: these tend diabolically to reconstitute themselves as soon as the enthusiasm and the libertarian fever of the liberators collapse. As we have seen in Italy in the last few decades, psychiatric clinics, for the most part private but affiliated to public institutions, are just swarming about, like sculptural solidifications of lava when it cools and no longer flows.

…the norm which ruled in China for a while, where the doctor was paid according to how healthy the people were; for every sick person, the salary was reduced. In short, real psychiatric work should have been preventative: a sort of ecological remediation to prevent madness.

5.

Basaglia and his followers hated the very idea of private psychiatry. All the private psychiatry clinics, above all those with a vast clientele and fat profits, were objects of total disdain; they called this “the madness industry.” But why was this profound ethical rejection not seen as valid for medical practice in general? Isn’t even a surgeon who performs eye operations on thousands of patients also an “industrialist of the cataract?” Every doctor really lives thanks to the ailments that beset people. Every therapist, even a humanitarian one, must live off the afflictions that beset people. Every therapist, even a humanitarian one, must secretly hope in some way that many people will be ill, because otherwise how could he or she live? Basaglia and the Basaglians had taken this contradiction very seriously: for them, private medicine is implicitly immoral.

But then, how is it possible to prevent even the psychiatrist paid out of the public purse from becoming a person who lives off the suffering of others? Basaglia cited the norm which ruled in China for a while, where the doctor was paid according to how healthy the people were; for every sick person, the salary was reduced. In short, real psychiatric work should have been preventative: a sort of ecological remediation to prevent madness. But with what tools, what techniques? Basaglia really didn’t have a precise idea about his. His heirs, then, tried to find practical solutions.

In conclusion, can we say that Basaglianism is a feat of the past? That it was too much an expression of that epoch that we call ‘68, and that really lasted until the end of the 1970s and therefore included the 180 law? Must we interpret the Basaglian spirit with the same reservations with which we now interpret what I would call the 1968 way of thinking?

And yet, despite all the reservations that I haven’t tried to hide in this essay, I believe that Basaglia isn’t only a relic of our years of roaring activism, full of dreams and illusions. In fact, his challenge to the primacy of technique has a particular timeliness today: much more than in Basaglia’s epoch, psychiatric technique is now really triumphant. The consumption of psychopharmaceuticals has become a mass practice; psychiatric techniques are much more pervasive in contemporary life than they were at the time. Psychiatry has flowed into multiple capillaries, and almost all of us are “mentally disordered people.” The psychiatry of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) puts itself forward as a rigorous science of human ill-being, and the new neuroscientific techniques promise a technical solution to spiritual problems. Even if Basaglia’s rejection of science and technique is certainly not the reply, nonetheless, without doubt, there bubbles up, even if in other forms, a refusal, at the same time ethical and philosophical, to tolerate the growing pretensions of science to resolve our spiritual problems and sufferings through technical means. There is once more a need to reconsider—in ethical terms, before we think about it in scientific and technical terms—our relation to the suffering of our minds. z

REFERENCES

Basaglia, F. (1968). L’istituzione negata [The Negated Institution]. Einaudi.

Piro, S. (1967). Il linguaggio schizofrenico [The language of schizophrenia]. Feltrinelli.