Library guide Italian Studies. “Democratic psychiatry & Franco Basaglia”

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After national identity and mafia and other organized-crime groups, Franco Basaglia‘s democratic psychiatry (or anti-psychiatry) is the third topic forthcoming from the collaboration with Elio Baldi and Linda Pennings at the Department of Italian Studies, aimed at broadening the UvA Library holdings (with acquisitions on topics related to diversity, equity and inclusion) and at increasing students’ access and use of the UvA Library (books) collections.

As summarized by leading scholar of Italian Studies, John Foot, in his entry on Basaglia for the The Oxford handbook of phenomenological psychopathology: «A radical psychiatrist, Franco Basaglia was born in Venice in 1924. He came into contact with phenomenological texts while studying psychiatry at the University of Padua in the 1940s and 1950s. When he became Director of the Psychiatric Hospital in the north-eastern city of Gorizia in 1961 he began to apply these ideas to the reform of the hospital. Wards were opened, walls knocked down (by the patients), and meetings held. Gorizia became a beacon for change in 1968 with the publication of Basaglia’s edited volume L’istituzione negata (The Negated Institution) (Einaudi 1968). A movement developed which culminated in the 1978 “Basaglia Law,” which closed down the entire Italian asylum system».

You can browse the guide below, or otherwise feel welcome to ask me a PDF version.

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