Franco Basaglia is still a household name in Italy. His name is always attached to Law 180 (“Basaglia’s law&rdquo
, promulgated in 1978. It was a rushed compromise of legislation that effectively ended the era of detention and repression for the mentally ill. Basaglia knew it was imperfect, warning that “we should avoid a sense of euphoria”, but it was the culmination of a career on the medical barricades. In the words of the Italian philosopher,Norberto Bobbio, it was “the only real reform” in Italian history. Basaglia died just two years later, aged only 56.
Born into a comfortable family in Venice in 1924, Basaglia (who happens to be my wife’s great-uncle), was an instinctive anti-fascist, covering the blackboards of his university in 1944 with the slogan: “Death to the Fascists, Freedom for the People”. Then a medical student, he was arrested and spent six months in prison. He became part of a famous uprising in April 1945 when he and fellow prisoners broke out and led an insurrection across the city. His experience in prison was formative: when he became director of a mental asylum in Gorizia, near the Yugoslavian border in the early 60s, he said: “It took me straight back to the war and the prison.” Primo Levi, too, was a big influence, as Basaglia would frequently draw comparisons between concentration camps and the asylum system. He felt that psychiatrists were closer to repressive prison guards than humane medics, and became fascinated by the so-called “anti-pyschiatrists” in Britain: RD Laing, Maxwell Jones and David Cooper. In experimental settings like the “Rumpus Room”, Villa 21, Dingleton and Kingsley Hall, they were trying not to demonise and medicalise mental illness, but to understand its existential and social elements, and to allow patients the dangerous freedom to explore, rather than repress, their crises. They wanted, in Cooper’s words, to understand whether invalids were truly ill, or had simply been invalidated.
[For more of this story, written by Tobias Jones, go to http://www.theguardian.com/boo...anco-basaglia-review]
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