Bonifica Umana: the psychoanalysis of human reclamation

Abstract

The concept of land reclamation has often been associated with a metaphorical meaning that extends it to the reclamation of human beings, i.e. in Italian, bonifica umana. This short essay departs from a famous statement by Sigmund Freud who, inspired by a well-known Dutch case, likened the work of psychoanalysis to that of reclaiming land from the sea. The essay then goes on to discuss the policies of reclaiming land under Fascism in Italy in the 1930s, the work of bonifica. Such work was soon called a process of bonifica integrale and finally of bonifica umana, with which it was intended as a proper programme of ‘human reclamation’, based on the eugenic ideas of medical scientist and researcher Nicola Pende as well as in the new Code of Criminal Law inaugurated by the regime in 1930. In other words, in the same way in which, according to Freud, the rational agency of the ego is supposed to emerge, with the help of psychoanalysis, from the chaos of the id, so too the programme of comprehensive and human reclamation was supposed to develop a new rational fascist society and humanity from the pre-existing ‘deadly marshes’, which would metaphorically represent the chaos of social and human life before the establishment of the new fascist regime. Finally, this essay considers the question of whether such views are inherent to the general direction of Western rationalism or are historically confined to Fascism.