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Psychosomatic feelings as memory practices

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Abstract

I here explore the manifestation of problematic memories on a psychosomatic level, with a focus on the work of psychiatrist Franco Basaglia (1924–1980) in the Italian city of Gorizia. As Basaglia transformed the local asylum into a Therapeutic Community during the 1960s, the city became a nationally acclaimed pilot for alternative psychiatry. After he left in 1968, Gorizia’s characterisation in the media shifted from being a radical experiment to a failed revolution, and the city has since held an ambiguous relationship with this heritage. Using the data gathered through an ethnography conducted between 2011 and 2012, I suggest that the controversial vicissitudes of ‘the Basaglia experience’ and the attempts to erase their emotional weight in Gorizia have left traces that I frame as embodied remembering practices. In discussing psychosomatic expressions of social discomfort, I formulate a body that is both somatic and psychological, contributing to a field at the intersection between psychoanalysis, trauma and affect studies.

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Notes

  1. The term Therapeutic Community was coined by Main (1946), in England in 1946, to denote a new strategy for dealing with wartime and post-war staff shortage, and an increase of patients in psychiatric hospitals. Maxwell Jones experimented with models of Therapeutic Communities at Mill Hill Hospital, in North London (1940–1945), Southern Hospital in Dartford, Kent (1945–1946), at Belmont Hospital in Surrey (1947–1959), and at Dingleton Hospital at Melrose, near Edinburgh (Kennard, 1998). Jones had developed a model of Therapeutic Community where the life of the ward was organised around a number of meetings between patients and staff and daily discussion groups managed by staff, with the aim of ‘arous[ing] the patient’s interests’. Techniques of role-playing and psychodrama were coupled with group psychotherapy, in a climate of permission and democracy (Jones, 1952, p. 56).

  2. This can also be described as a form of ‘institutional syndrome’, whereby patients who had spent extended periods of time in the hospital, deprived of independence, privacy and responsibility, showed significant and persisting impairments in social and life skills.

  3. Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana, or DC), was a moderate conservative political party which emerged in the post-war years. It was generally opposed to the Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI), and the Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI), and remained in power from 1948 to 1992. It incorporated various moderate political factions, from conservatives to liberals and social democrats (Ginsborg, 1990; Damilano and Pansa, 2006). The role played by political parties in the country since the post-war years and into the 1990s can hardly be overestimated. Party loyalties and affiliations, institutionalised into various social cleavages, ‘cut deeply into the fabric of society and into Italian consciousness’ (Shore, 1993, p. 29). Since political parties can be seen, in all effects, as cultural systems, ‘[t]o be called “Christian Democrat”, “Socialist” or “Communist” in Italy is not, therefore, an arbitrary label but a fundamental dimension of public identity: it means belonging to a clearly defined social and cultural group with clearly circumscribed rules and boundaries’ (Shore, 1993, p. 31).

  4. After the protests of 1968 and 1969 had mobilised extremist political fringes across Italy and Europe, the polarisation between the left and the right strongly radicalised, with the emergence of various autonomist movements. The 1970s were a time of violence and political tension in the country, stemming from radical groups aligned to the left, to the right, or to anarchist currents (Cento Bull and Giorgio, 2006). The decade is referred to as the Years of Lead, ruled by a police state and strong security measures, which fed a general tension and constant fear in the population, as well as a growing loss of trust in State institutions (Cento Bull, 2007).

  5. The term Restauration originally refers to the Bourbon Restauration (or Restoration), as the name given to the period following the French Revolution (1789–1799), the end of the First Republic (1792–1804), and the end of the First French Empire under Napoleon (1804–1814/1815), when the French monarchy was restored. The term generally refers to the period from 1814 until 1830, which was characterised by a strongly conservative policy (Crawley, 1969 [1965]).

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Trivelli, E. Psychosomatic feelings as memory practices. Subjectivity 8, 409–431 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2015.16

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