Franco Basaglia

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Franco Basaglia (1979)

Franco Basaglia (born March 11, 1924 in Venice , † August 29, 1980 ibid) was an Italian psychiatrist . Basaglia made the catastrophic conditions in the Italian “ insane asylums ” known and in 1978 they closed them.

Life

Franco Basaglia studied medicine at the University of Padua . He completed his studies in 1949. He then worked as a teacher at the local psychiatry school. At the same time he dealt with the philosophical ideas of Karl Jaspers , Ludwig Binswanger and Eugène Minkowski .

When Basaglia took over the management of the psychiatric hospital in Gorizia in 1961 , he was appalled by the conditions there. The institutions were run like high-security units. Common “therapies” were strapping patients into beds, straitjackets , ice-cold baths, electric shocks, and the use of lobotomies .

Based on this experience, Basaglia later closed the institutions. Together with Giovanni Jervis and Agostino Pirella, he first introduced the structures and principles of the therapeutic community in Gorizia . But these reform approaches soon turned out to be insufficient. In 1968 the team separated: Basaglia became head of the psychiatric clinic in Colorno ( Parma ), Pirella took over the management in Gorizia and Jervis went to the province of Reggio Emilia .

From 1972 Basaglia worked in Trieste . Here he came to the conclusion that only a dissolution of the institutions could lead to an efficient treatment of the disease. Similar to Erving Goffman , he took the view that the institution, the labeling and the exclusion from society also produce morbid behavior. The aim was therefore the outpatient treatment of mentally ill people, i. H. their return to society in order to recognize and treat the true illness. He used a cooperative working model for psychiatric occupational therapy. This experiment has had a major impact on the Italian cooperative movement, as the Italian social cooperatives emerged from it.

The therapeutic successes in Trieste, Basaglia's high-profile appearance and favorable political conditions ultimately led to the Italian legislature being convinced of the demands. On May 13, 1978, Law 180 for the Reform of Psychiatry was passed in the Italian Parliament . a. decreed the abolition of psychiatric institutions.

In the spring of 1980 Basaglia showed the first symptoms of a fatal brain tumor; on August 29, 1980 he died in his home in Venice.

Positions

Franco Basaglia and his wife and colleague Franca Ongaro Basaglia are regarded as outstanding European intellectuals and, like Michel Foucault , Thomas Szasz , and Jan Foudraine, as representatives of radical psychiatry and social criticism and as opponents of institutional psychiatry. Although Basaglia shared some important positions in antipsychiatry , he expressly refused to define his theory and practice as such. In contrast to Ronald D. Laing and David Cooper , for example , he did not look for alternatives outside the institution, but worked within it, working “with the institution against the institution” and never gave up his job as a psychiatrist for the public health services. Basaglia understood mental illness as a phenomenon that can only be adequately explored within the framework of a philosophical-metaphysical logic and science, and thus contradicted hegemonic positivism.

Fonts

  • Franco Basaglia: The negated institution or the community of the excluded. An experiment at the psychiatric clinic in Gorizia. Translation by Anneheide Ascheri-Osterlow. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1971.
  • Franco Basaglia (Ed.): What is Psychiatry? Translation by Anneheide Ascheri-Osterlow. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1974.
  • Franco Basaglia: The Psychiatrist's Decision. Balance of a life's work. Editing by Friedemann Pfäfflin. Psychiatrie-Verlag, Bonn 2002, ISBN 3-88414-259-3 .
  • Franco Basaglia (ed.): Pacification crime: on the servitude of the intellectuals. Translation: Claudia Honegger. Europ. Verlag-Anst., Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-434-00427-0 .

literature

  • Giuseppe Armocida - Bruno Zanobio:  Basaglia, Franco. In: Massimiliano Pavan (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 34:  Primo supplemento AC. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1988.
  • Mario Colucci, Pierangelo Di Vittorio: Franco Basaglia. Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2001.
  • Jürgen Härle: The democratic psychiatry in Italy. Model or utopia. Munich 1988.
  • Malte König: Franco Basaglia and the law 180. The dissolution of the psychiatric institutions in Italy 1978. In: Petra Terhoeven (Ed.): Italy, views. New perspectives on Italian history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2010, pp. 209–233.
  • Horacio Riquelme (ed.): The new Italian psychiatry. Change in clinical practice and in psychosocial territory. Frankfurt am Main 1988.

Movies

  • C'era una volta la città dei matti ... (Eng. "Once upon a time there was a city of fools ..."). Director: Marco Turco , Producers: Rai Fiction and Ciao Ragazzi, 2010
  • La seconda ombra (Eng. "The second shadow"). Director: Silvano Agosti , 2000, Istituto Luce.
  • E. Agapito: I grandi della Scienza del Novecento: Franco Basaglia (The Great of the 20th Century Science: Franco Basaglia). Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 (English, videos on YouTube ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dr. Oscar Kiesswetter: Franco Basaglia - Psychiatrist and Cooperative Pioneer, Lecture on November 2, 2019, 14th Conference on Cooperative History, Hamburg
personal data
SURNAME Basaglia, Franco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian psychiatrist
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Venice
DATE OF DEATH August 29, 1980
Place of death Venice