Abstract
In the 1960s Franco Basaglia, the Director of a Psychiatric Hospital in a small city on the edge of Italy (Gorizia), began to transform that institution from the inside. He introduced patient meetings and set up a kind of Therapeutic Community. In 1968 he asked two photographers – Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin – to take photos inside Gorizia and other asylums. These images were then used in a photobook called Morire di Classe (To Die Because of your Class) (1969). This article re-examines in detail the content of this celebrated book and its history, and its impact on the struggle to reform and abolish large-scale psychiatric institutions. It also places the book in its social and political context and as a key text of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s.
Highlights
The first time I saw a psychiatric hospital on the inside was in Gorizia under Franco Basaglia’s Directorship – where there were no longer any strait-jackets, but there was still a sense of poverty and people who had been inside for fifty years or so who no longer noticed the presence of walls or bars
By 1967 all the wards were unlocked. Basaglia, working with his wife Franca and a small but highly motivated team, argued strongly for the abolition of large-scale psychiatric institutions, which he often compared to concentration camps or prisons
The Gorizia experiment became famous towards the end of the 1960s through the publication of a best-selling collective book L’istituzione negata (The Institution Denied; Basaglia, 1968) and a TV documentary shot inside the asylum that was seen by millions across Italy (I Giardini di Abele, Zavoli, 1969)
Summary
The first time I saw a psychiatric hospital on the inside was in Gorizia under Franco Basaglia’s Directorship – where there were no longer any strait-jackets, but there was still a sense of poverty and people who had been inside for fifty years or so who no longer noticed the presence of walls or bars. Berengo Gardin took photographs during the demonstration, some of which have appeared in later books linked to Morire di Classe (Brugnoli, 1998–9; Pivetta, 2012: 213–14).
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