Basaglia’s “anti-psychiatry” interpreted through Galtung’s definiton of a(n inner) conflict
di Antonino Drago
Present communication shows that Franco Basaglia’s intellectual path from a positivist conception to an existentialist and Heideggerian conception of psychiatry corresponds to an adding to the only dimension of objective Behavior (B) which the traditional psychiatry saw in a mentally ill person, two more dimensions: C (contradiction, feelings, human relationships) and A (assumptions, pre-conceptions) so that without knowing it Basaglia shared Johan Galtung’s representation of a(n inner) conflict as an A-B-C. Through Galtung’s definition a mental illness is characterized as a C which determines the personal behavior B, whereas A is unconscious. On the other hand, an institution is characterized as an A which determines a person’s behavior B (also within his collective actions) by suffocating his C. Moreover, through the A-B-C the psychoanalytical method is characterized as a process of growing awareness of both Patient and Analyst; this process is performed
by a specific cooperation of two actors during a session: Patient’s B is the soft behavior of remembering dreams, while Analyst’s B is silent; moreover, A is silent in the former one, while is active in the latter one; C is verbally expressed by the former one while is virtually simulated by the latter one. In such a way they together make experience of the inner conflict at issue as they were only one person with his own A-B-C. It is shown that the decisive steps of this therapeutic process are based on a clever use of negations, culminating in a translation from a virtual world to a real world; this translation consists in an Analyst’s application of the principle of sufficient reason, suitably subjected to two reality constraints, to the conclusion of his elaborated theory of Patient’s ill. This kind of therapeutic process of a Patient parallels what Basaglia performed for overcoming the forced life inside an authoritarian institution (asylum). I will interpret the conflict between a person with mental illness and an institution, where institution’s interaction with a patient is interpreted as a triadic conflict, indicated by an A-B-C. Basaglia’ general attitude is at last discussed.