Il Traitement moral (XVIII-XIX secc.) e lo specchio dell’antipsichiatria italiana

Abstract

The essay initially considers the rise and decline of a specific practice in the history of psychiatry known as moral treatment (18th-19th centuries) and then critically addresses its role in late-twentieth-century anti-psychiatry, which sought to establish itself—especially in Basaglia and his team—with a renewed historical perspective and an autonomous relationship with respect to the events of "classical" psychiatry. The experience of moral treatment, in fact, recurs several times in the discussions born within the "Democratic Psychiatry" movement, whose phenomenological imprint, as is well known, aimed to profoundly renew the discourse on madness by separating it from any psychiatric vision still anchored in positivist schemes and the very biomedical roots of medicine. The essay, therefore, clarifies the framework of the transformations linked to the reading of moral treatment and allows us to understand the hermeneutic matrices through which this therapeutic approach to madness was observed in the twentieth century, in an argument that evaluates, beyond the theoretical framework, also the developments of the most recent historiography.