The early 1960s saw the vast influence of existentialism in European culture, literature, cinema, and the arts, with its various currents most closely related to French or German philosophical developments or related to Marxism or structuralism. In the same period, psychiatry began to move away from a strictly organicistic view to update psychopathology in a phenomenological sense, as well as experiment with new theories of psychotherapeutics and rehabilitation. These are the years of the madness of Michel Foucault, the first writings translated into Italian by Sullivan, and the initial anti-psychiatric criticisms with the writings of Szasz and Laing.<\/p>\n
In this context, more broadly cultural and more specifically psychiatric, Massimo Fagioli moved the former steps of his career. His experiences, initially at the psychiatric hospital in Venice and then in Padua and Switzerland, show, as he has told, the progressive search for understanding mental illness, crossing the nineteenth-century theories of Kraepelin, phenomenological psychiatry of the twentieth century, and psychoanalysis. The transition from the psychiatric hospital of Venice to the psychiatric hospital of Padua determines the moment in which the confrontation with phenomenological and existential psychopathology becomes more intense.<\/p>\n
Therefore, it appears useful to retrace those moments to understand the interest and then the rejection that Fagioli expressed towards that psychiatry and consequently of that philosophy that strongly pervaded the Italian and European culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Undoubtedly a fascinating element of the phenomenological approach was the image of the possibility of a relationship with the patient who, while remaining in the context of a descriptive process, expressed an interest in the patient’s experience that had not found space in any previous research attempt. In the context of this dialectic in the psychopathological field, in the possibilities of an intense clinical exercise, but even more so in the specific hospital transformation movement psychiatrist in the therapeutic community, Fagioli is overcoming the theoretical assumption phenomenological of the mere possibility of observing the patient, going beyond the rigid criteria categorical nosographic and adding the psychotherapeutic element to the relationship with the patient transformative, the idea of \u200b\u200ba psychodynamic movement within the context of the relationship itself.<\/p>\n
The therapeutic relationship is not the audience from which one witnesses the unfolding scene but becomes the stage whose therapeutic element takes shape. Coexistence with “insulin” patients in the community of Padua is the moment in which Fagioli manages to imagine “a group” \u201cspontaneously formed\u201d with a psychic movement that becomes for each of the participants a “sketch of collective identity” where “psychotherapeutic action” can take place. In other words, not only the possibility of expressing themselves appears for the patient, but also the opportunity to receive, for the sole condition of the relationship, even in the incomprehensibility of the “schizophrenic strangeness”. The psychiatrist becomes a therapist. Psychiatry that treats is born.<\/p>\n
Through the many occasions on which Fagioli narrated his experience and expressed his theoretical oppositions, it is now possible to reconstruct his critical thinking and his lucid and profound opposition to those philosophical theories which, despite being fascinating, did not have a real therapeutic intention. From the Sixties to the end of his human journey, Fagioli has never stopped reflecting and re-proposing new and more incisive criticisms both in the many occasions of debates and interviews and in the years in which he wrote in his column \u201cTransformation\u201d in the journal \u201cLeft\u201d and the which he gave lectures at the University of Chieti.<\/p>\n
This confrontation-clash, which began with the opposition to the negation of the unconscious dimension and in rejecting Barison who opposed his psychoanalytic training, was then articulated and deepened after the discovery of the disappearance fantasy, with the denunciation of the nihilistic attitude towards the possibility of the cure of mental illness, of the existentialist position of denial of human birth and of Heidegger’s Nazi proposal towards the human with the concepts of living for death, nothingness and existential anguish.<\/p>\n
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