We should send a big thank you to Franco Basaglia on the centenary of his birth. He left us in 1980, shortly after the implementation of a law, 180, which was decisive for saving mental health. Then there were decades in which the momentum of Basaglia’s ideas was slowed down and finally quelled, to the point that today a relaunch would be absolutely necessary before a curtain of silence and normalization distances us from the practice and thought that have spread in the entire planet starting from Trieste.
We must “return” that Basaglia that was taken from us in a slow, programmatic, almost inexorable way. We must, above all, in my opinion, put the word “restitution” itself at the center of our attitude of critical relaunch, observing how Basaglia has used it. Against whom? First of all towards the so-called “mentally ill”, with the closure of mental hospitals and the transformation into citizens of all those who had lost their civil rights in mental hospitals.
We will never stop thanking him for this, going through the thousand stumbles that law 180 has encountered and still suffers: a not easy “liberation”, which was hindered by lowering our eyes and blocking our ears in often indecent ways.
But the word “restitution” goes beyond such a social, cultural and political clearing away, it asks us to return to observing what has happened to mental illness and how much remains to be done to reactivate that concrete dialogue that Basaglia has promoted and which is usually we remember little and badly. Here “giving back” means entering into the living flesh of the issue of so-called madness, it means not limiting ourselves to talking about the mentally ill, while we feel healthy and in any case different from them.
We must say thank you to Basaglia because he taught us that subjectivity as a whole is at stake here, not just that of some people out there, but rather the subjectivity of each of us in here, including doctors of course, but including everyone beyond beyond any difference in role, wealth or gender. When Basaglia told us that we need to “restore subjectivity”, he did not limit himself to speaking as a psychiatrist to psychiatrists because he launched his message as a “subject” to all the subjects who wanted to listen to him, a message in which the ” who we are?” of each of us.
Twenty years ago, in a course of lectures at the University of Trieste, I spoke about this “subjectivation” promoted by Basaglia, inviting many of his collaborators to express themselves and naturally the students who participated in those philosophy lessons: a volume entitled precisely Restituting subjectivity (published by alphabeta Verlag and expected in a re-edition by the publisher Meltemi, who is today relaunching the series “180. Critical archive of mental health”). But what exactly does “restoring subjectivity” mean?
We can understand this if we see that the mental hospital has taken away their subjectivity from the mentally ill, making them mute and inert. We come to understand this if we think about the fact that the mentally ill today, however, suffer a potential degradation: they do not fully have their subjectivity. But we have a hard time believing that any of us would participate in such a need for restitution, to a lesser or greater extent.
Basaglia made us understand that reason and madness belong to each of us, without exception, that reason does not erase madness and, above all, that it is essential to recognize that only in this way can we resonate with mental disorder and work to restore subjectivity of the other who is next to us and asks us to take care of him.
We need to know this if we claim to restore subjectivity to someone. But we must, first of all, understand that it is always a question of keeping in mind that this subjectivity must also be returned to ourselves, because each of us, from this point of view, is an oscillating and incomplete subject. Thank you Basaglia for making us understand, or even just intuit, as a decisive cultural need without which our life can hardly be understood as civil.