Franco Basaglia

Franco Basaglia ( born March 11 1924 in Venice, † August 29, 1980 ) was an Italian psychiatrist. Basaglia made ​​the catastrophic conditions in the Italian " asylums " known and reached its closure in 1978.

Life

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

As Basaglia 1961 took over the management of the psychiatric hospital in Gorizia, he was appalled by the conditions prevailing there. The institutions were performed as high security areas. Usual "therapies" were buckling up of the patients in the beds, straitjackets, ice-cold baths, electric shocks, and the use of the lobotomy.

From this experience Basaglia operation later the closure of institutions. Together with Giovanni Jervis and Agostino Pirella he led in Gorizia first one the structures and principles of the therapeutic community. However, these reform efforts soon proved to be not far-reaching enough. In 1968, the team parted: 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 resolution of institutions could lead to an efficient treatment of the disease. Similar to Erving Goffman, he took the view that the institution, labeling and exclusion from society in addition produce pathological behavior. The aim was therefore the outpatient treatment of mentally ill people, that is, their return to the company in order to thus recognize and treat the real disease can.

The therapeutic success in Trieste, Basaglias a publicity appearance and favorable political conditions eventually led to the fact that the Italian legislature was persuaded by the claims. On 13 May 1978, the law was passed 180 for the reform of psychiatry in the Italian Parliament, which decreed inter alia the abolition of psychiatric institutions.

In the spring of 1980 were found in Basaglia the first symptoms of a deadly brain tumor; August 29, 1980, he died at his home in Venice.

Mental illness without spirit

The epistemological orientation of the position, which represented Basaglia can be judged as a radical anti - positivist. Basaglia criticized on the psychiatry of the 20th century that this has no spirit reduces the diseases of the mind on diseases ( spirit in the sense of philosophical metaphysics and their corresponding forms of classical humanities). The historically oldest access to the phenomenon of mental illness was one about rational thinking mediated. Even the madness of effect was considered as a particular way of thinking, the judge or closes according to special or wrong criteria and thus produces symptoms. In rationalist terms thus also the madness of a symptomatic nature of logic and as an unusual portion of the human reason needs to be recognized. The emerged from the empiricism positivism viewed in contrast, the mental illness being as purely organic brain - and neuro- biologically determined phenomenon. Was a result of the triumph of the positivist paradigm in the science of the 20th century, every sense, which can be placed under the delusion potentially, exiled from psychiatry. The positivist method contradicts the effect itself, as it must presume the one phenomenon to be real, which excludes them from the area recognized by their logic. On one hand, distinguishes the scientistic positivism the madness of abstract of the scientific recognized instrumental reason, on the other hand, he identifies the non- instrumental or dialectical- speculative reason also with a kind of madness - sense, namely with the ideas of the older metaphysics, which for no meaning medical psychiatry should play more. It is thus ruled out in two ways the madness of: both as a disease of the mind as well as a reasonable mind in the sense of the dialectical ideas emptiness. The spirit of the disease and the madness of as manifestations of ' mind and spirit ' in the strong sense contemporary forms of logical articulation on the one hand rejected the other hand, provided in a distorted and reified form. The objectified by this self - contradictory process of elimination phenomenon can logically not be reasonably open-minded and adequately interpreted. Foucault also has the positivist exile of the dialectical- speculative reason of which the modern science field roundly criticizes in this context. These have hypostatizes shortened terms of reason and madness as unconveyable contradictions of human experience. Basaglias anti- positivist attitude comes pointedly in the following quote expresses: .. "Currently, we observe how the medicine incorporated psychiatry slowly If the disease is a matter of organs that psychiatry with medicine has nothing in common Psychiatry has always been the science of madness. perhaps one could say that they had a more ' philosophical ' vision of madness, at least as long as they did not join in the game of positivism, that is, until the time, began as a psychiatrist to develop models in which the mind is no longer occurs. " ( Franco Basaglia, the decision of the psychiatrist, p 83, the balance of a life's work, Bonn 2002) Basaglia has obviously grasped the mental illness as a phenomenon that can be tapped adequately only in the context of a philosophical- metaphysical logic and science. This contradicts the positivist demon who dominated psychiatry in this postmodern era of hegemonic manner. Thus Basaglias approach to social- psychiatric criticism of positivist psychiatry still has to be assessed as up to date. The work Basaglias should not be merely reduced to the requirement that the psychiatric institutions to smash and institutions are too close. This empirically appearing surface merely pragmatic demands is still the hermeneutic deep structure of a rational and dialectical recognition of delusion - sense as irreducible aspect of every possible logic and reason at all to reason.

Franco Basaglia counts next to Ronald D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, David Cooper on Jan Foudraine and Michel Foucault to the most important representatives of the anti-psychiatry.

Writings

  • Franco Basaglia: The negated institution or the community of the excluded. An experiment of the psychiatric hospital in Gorizia, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1971
  • Franco Basaglia (ed. ): What is psychiatry, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1974
  • Franco Basaglia: The decision of the psychiatrist. Balance of a life's work, Bonn: Psychiatric Publishing, 2002, ISBN 978-3-88414-259-2
  • Franco Basaglia (ed.): pacification of crime: on the easement of intellectuals, Frankfurt: Europ. ET - Anst. , 1980, ISBN 3-434-00427-0
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