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“L’alienato nella cella è libero.” Mario Tobino Between Le libere donne di Magliano and Per le antiche scale

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The Years of Alienation in Italy

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Abstract

By analyzing Le libere donne di Magliano (1953) and Per le antiche scale (1972), this chapter offers a critical insight of Tobino’s conception of the asylum as a response to mental illness. Framing his thought in relation to these two works, this chapter illustrates and analyzes his position regarding the debate that surrounded Law 180 of 1978 and its underlying principles during the so-called years of alienation. The analysis claims that Tobino, a psychiatrist with vacillating ideas and a problematic attitude towards his female patients, should have no further weight in the discussion that still today, on its fortieth anniversary, revolves around the closure of asylums in Italy.

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Change history

  • 10 October 2019

    The book was inadvertently published with the given name and family name of the author differently abbreviated in all the chapters as A. S. Tarabochia; whereas it has been updated as A. Sforza Tarabochia.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Before Tobino, only Corrado Tumiatti in his Tetti rossi (1931) had described the experiences of a psychiatrist working in an asylum.

  2. 2.

    Law 180 dealt with the “Accertamenti e trattamenti sanitari volontari e obbligatori,” and opened with the line: “Gli accertamenti e i trattamenti sanitari sono volontari.” Law 180 was soon incorporated into Law 833, which established the National Health Service (23 December 1978). Law 180 banned long-term residential facilities for psychiatric health care (such as asylums, psychiatric hospitals, and psychiatric wards in general hospitals), and regulated the Trattamento Sanitario Obbligatorio (involuntary hospitalization), repealing the main articles of Law 36 of February 14, 1904 , “Disposizioni sui manicomi e sugli alienati: Custodia e cura degli alienati.”

  3. 3.

    He was here referring to “those ‘alternative’ psychiatrists” that include Basaglia, thanks to whose political activism “the general population was made aware of the backwardness of Italian psychiatry [catching] the attention” of the psychiatrist Bruno Orsini (b.1929), the Christian Democrat Senator who formulated Law 180 and successfully campaigned for its approval (Sforza Tarabochia 2013, p. 2). For Tobino, “[s]mantellare le strutture ospedaliere e rispedire i malati a casa […], in funzione di un modello astratto che prescinde da qualunque valutazione specifica del singolo individuo e dalla gravità del suo male”, was “una scelta […] semplicistica” (Bresciani Califano 2011, p. 71).

  4. 4.

    According to Vecchis (2010, p. 183), the article, titled “Lasciateli in pace, è casa loro,” would have influenced the formulation of Article 8 of Law 180.

  5. 5.

    Basaglia (quoted in Castelli 1978) replied: “Il rapporto […] fra informazione e disinformazione si squilibra a vantaggio della seconda quando si affidi alla penna cechoviana di uno scrittore l’analisi di un ambiente che è in realtà la tesi dell’ideologia dominante. Oggettivamente il suo scritto rende un grosso servizio al potere.”

  6. 6.

    For a detailed account of “anti-psychiatry” see Sforza Tarabochia (2013, pp. 68–74).

  7. 7.

    In a comic vignette produced by the art collective Arcobaleno, created in 1972 and led by artist Ugo Guarino (1927–2016) in the asylum of Trieste, we read: “Noi degenti e lavoratori dell’ospedale psichiatrico di TS siamo tutti nella stessa pentola […]!” This exclamation is uttered by four sketched people who pop out of a pot: these are the inmates of the asylum but also the workers (a cook and, it seems, a nurse). What this poster suggests is that all the elements of the pyramid are equally subordinated to the institution itself.

  8. 8.

    This was the Legge 18 marzo 1968, n. 431 Provvidenze per l’assistenza psichiatrica published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 101 on April 20, 1968.

  9. 9.

    Tobino (1972, pp. 155 and 171) returns to Fascism later on, but never engages in a discussion on the ways the regime had instrumentalized the asylum.

  10. 10.

    As a matter of fact, he does not focus on the asylum itself nor on psychiatry as it was practiced therein: the confinement “all’alga” is the only practice that is described in some detail. Electroshock (Tobino 2012, pp. 87 and 99) as well as force-feeding (p. 33) are only referred to in passing (on Tobino’s view of electroshock see De Vecchis 2010, pp. 176–177, n. 14).

  11. 11.

    See De Vecchis (2010, pp. 175–178).

  12. 12.

    For instance, Tobino’s nephew Zappella (2010, p. 159) comments on the debates that preceded the formulation of Law 180. Throughout the essay, strong accusations and sarcasm (he calls the ideological movement that culminated with the closure of asylums “la Moda” with a capital “M;” Zappella 2010, p. 161) are reinforced by rhetorical reflections (e.g. he writes that the government that passed Law 180 was the same that “faceva morire Aldo Moro” Zappella 2010, p. 159). The problems in this essay are repeated in several works by supporters of Tobino’s. They laud his alleged good intentions, which frequently results in an unsubstantiated and blind defense of his viewpoints on Law 180.

  13. 13.

    Tobino also referred to former prostitutes in patently judgmental tones: besides Benni in Libere, we read in Una vacanza romana: “Ben povera di senso morale, di buon senso, di giudizio” (1992, p. 155). This was the seventeenth of twenty-four clinical folders from Maggiano that Tobino included in an appendix to this text. Other clinical folders have been transcribed by Martinucci (1995) in her thesis: pp. 108–110 (Benni); pp. 112–113 (Canti); pp. 115–117 (Chiromante); pp. 121–124 (Berlucchi); pp. 127–29 (Galli Elsa); pp. 134–137 (Cucitrici). She also included a selection in appendix, pp. 145–154 (Lella, Signora Alfonsa, Sbisà, Marzi, Signora Maresca, Fratesi).

  14. 14.

    On Tobino’s method in writing his patients’ stories, see Del Beccaro (1967, p. 25).

  15. 15.

    Explicit descriptions are more conspicuous in Libere, but we find such references also in Antiche: “Una bellissima donna […]. Si ricordava Anselmo [che] sotto le vesti, sotto la camicia, continuava la bellezza” (Tobino 1972, p. 122).

  16. 16.

    The passing of time in Libere is signaled by references to the seasons: the first section covers a period of time that goes from spring to summer, the second a subsequent period covering the months from the autumn to the summer of the following year, and the third goes from summer to autumn.

  17. 17.

    In the Professoressa’s fragment we find another voyeuristic element: “In queste lussurie […] né manca di apparire Suor Giacinta, a dirigere tutto ciò” (Tobino 2012, p. 42).

  18. 18.

    See for instance Battistini (2018).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Wissia Fiorucci

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  1. Wissia Fiorucci
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Correspondence to Wissia Fiorucci .

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  1. School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Alessandra Diazzi

  2. Department of Modern Languages School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Alvise Sforza Tarabochia

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Fiorucci, W. (2019). “L’alienato nella cella è libero.” Mario Tobino Between Le libere donne di Magliano and Per le antiche scale. In: Diazzi, A., Sforza Tarabochia, A. (eds) The Years of Alienation in Italy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15150-8_12

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