Chaosophy - autonomous learning

contradictory positions confronted one another during an international
congress in Vienna in 1968, which Basaglia concluded by
leaving and slamming the door behind him.
In Italy, where the state of the hospitals and the legislation is
undoubtedly one of the most archaic in Europe, such illusions can
hardly be dismissed-given the infamous stamp on the police
record of psychiatric inmates, inmates denied their civil rights, and
torture by strangulation: "a sheet, usually wet, is twisted tightly
around the neck to prevent breathing: the loss of consciousness is
immediate" (Basagila, p. 164). Basaglia harbors no illusions about
the experiment of Gorizia: its future was doomed; at best, events
would unfold as they did in Maxwell Jones's therapeutic communities
at Dingleton, that is to say, in a "didactic and therapeutic
engagement pursued on the staff level, but which retreats into the
particular domain of institutional interests" (p. 100).
Unlike what generally happened elsewhere, the "psyciatric
revolution" of Basaglia and his group was not "for laughs." From
year to year, we witness an absolute escalation which has, moreover,
lead to serious difficulties for its instigators. The open door [policy] ,
ergotherapy, sociotherapy, sectorization-all these were implemented
but did not cohere in a satisfying way. Was it the context
of the Italian "creeping May" that entailed this permanent refusal
of all self-satisfaction Or was it the indifference of the Italian state
and its inability to promote reform which discouraged every
attempt at renewal In any case, the "avant-garde" of Gorizia was
no longer there: the "common goal" became "institutional
change," the "negation of the institution," the Italian equivalent of
the antipsychiatry of Laing and Cooper in England.2
The very honesty of this book leads us to question the desperate
nature of this endeavor. Is it not secretly preoccupied by a desire to
bring things to the verge of collapse Isn't the dialectical process on
the way to transforming itself in forward flight and, in a sense,
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