Abstract
This chapter sets out to investigate how and why Italian psychoanalysis has dealt with the notion of alienation over the 1960s, the years of the so-called “economic miracle” (1958–1963), which coincided with a vast diffusion of the discipline in Italy. First, this contribution examines the relationship between these two phenomena, identifying in the decade in question Italy’s years of alienation par excellence, a time of psychological and collective discomfort that led Italians to the couch. Secondly, the chapter aims to demonstrate that psychoanalysis itself turned its attention to society, in an attempt not to separate the analysis of personal suffering from the examination of collective manifestations of psychological disorders. Addressing alienation therefore enabled Italian psychoanalysis to develop a unique engaged character, which meant the discipline did not clash with the imperative to impegno (political commitment) that was dominating Italian culture and society in those days.
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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.
The absence of the term in Laplanche’s and Pontalis’s dictionary of psychoanalysis, translated into English as The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973), confirms the lack of a systematization of the term in Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis.
- 2.
The Olivetti company offered to employees a variety of services that supported them and their families (accommodation, nurseries, holiday camps for children, an enhanced maternity leave). For more on this theme see Ciuffetti and Trisoglio (2017).
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Diazzi, A. (2019). Alienation and Psychoanalysis: Some Notes on Italy in the Years of the Economic Miracle. 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_7
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