Abstract

This article presents a Deweyan reading of the processes of critique, experimentation, and reform that took hold of a minority of psychiatric institutions in Western Europe during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, under the influence of the so-called Italian and British antipsychiatry movements. Framed within a specific understanding of the sixties, the article examines these complex theoretical and institutional operations against the background of John Dewey's idea of democracy, which it interprets, above all else, as the constant provision of material, intellectual, and human resources for the people to directly transform their environment and themselves in increasingly complex and creative ways. After acknowledging the historical and conceptual discontinuities that exist between these two autonomous bodies of knowledge, the first section presents a summary of Dewey's philosophy. Next the article sheds light on Basaglia's and Laing's antipsychiatric projects by interpreting them as a sustained effort to distinguish between schizophrenia as a first and a second disease, an epistemological search in the midst of which each of them ended up creating new institutions that necessarily embarked their inmates on a radical process of Deweyan growth. The key role of the sixties counterculture is emphasized at this point, and examples from Gorizia's and Trieste's asylums, as well as British community households, are read in terms of Basaglia's and Laing's negative and affirmative dialectics, respectively. Finally, in the last two sections, the article argues that antipsychiatry's analysis of psychotic behavior significantly enlarges Dewey's understanding of the circuit of growth and experience, and that Dewey's ideas of growth and experience provided, in turn, a missing criterion for defining mental health and deriving coherent therapeutic and institutional concretions.

Highlights

  • This article presents a Deweyan reading of the intense processes of critique, experimentation, and reform that took hold of a minority of psychiatric institutions in Western Europe during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, under the influence of the so-called antipsychiatry movement (Burns, 2020; Double, 2002; Foot, 2015; Wall, 2019)

  • Through a close analysis of socio-economic, political, and cultural phenomena of the period—radical ones included, like the upsurge of hippie communes in North America (Villacañas de Castro, forthcoming), or the institutions of antipsychiatry examined in this case—this historical interpretation takes the view that the aspirations and forms of life displayed by the sixties counterculture were not peripheral manifestations from radicalized, eccentric minorities

  • Just as Dewey had made sure that school occupations connected with the democratic strengths of industrial capitalism while simultaneously removing the obstacles to growth posed by that same society, an overarching analysis of Goffman’s total institutions, therapeutic communities, and the institutions of antipsychiatry would reveal how each of these institutions built on the previous outlooks of others by selectively appropriating their more democratic features and discarding the rest

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Summary

Introduction

This article presents a Deweyan reading of the intense processes of critique, experimentation, and reform that took hold of a minority of psychiatric institutions in Western Europe during the nineteen-sixties and seventies, under the influence of the so-called antipsychiatry movement (Burns, 2020; Double, 2002; Foot, 2015; Wall, 2019). At that point the article will bring to the fore the strong ties that both the Italian and British strands of antipsychiatry shared with the sixties and seventies counterculture, which I interpret as instrumental to their breakthroughs By reading these authors, works, concepts, and realities together, I wish to argue that antipsychiatry was, essentially Deweyan—and that likewise, had Dewey offered his own systematic psychiatry, it would have been one aligned with the fundamental tenets of antipsychiatry. To the extent that Dewey’s ideas of growth and experience were founded on robust democratic principles which anchored in the ontological plane, I believe they can provide a missing criterion for defining mental health and deriving coherent therapeutic and institutional concretions This is exactly what the title of this article wishes to convey by reformulating one of the main mottoes of the Italian Psiquiatria Democratica—“freedom is therapeutic” (see Fioritti, 2018)—in terms of Deweyan democracy being therapeutic. Is democracy therapeutic? The arguments presented in this article conclude that both Dewey and the antipsychiatrists would have agreed and affirmed that it is

Dewey and Democratic Institutions
First and Second Disease
Conclusion
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