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Chaosophy - autonomous learning

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etraying itself For an tipsych ia try , political intervention constitutes<br />

the prerequisite of all therapeutics. But doesn't the agreement<br />

around the "negation of the institution," which has meaning only<br />

if it is taken up by a real avant-garde and securely achored in social<br />

reality, risk serving as a springboard for a new form of social repression,<br />

this time at the level of global society and aiming at the very<br />

status of madness<br />

Basaglia states that with the medications that he administers<br />

"the doctor calms his own anxiety in the face of a patient with<br />

whom he does not know how to enter into contact nor find a common<br />

language" (p. 117). An ambiguous and perhaps demagogic<br />

expression: psychopharmacology is not, in itself, a reactionary<br />

science! It is the context of its use that must be called into question.<br />

Nosography, too, is perhaps a little rashly thrown overboard.<br />

The ways of repression are sometimes subtle! Those who uphold<br />

normality at any price can become more effective than the police!<br />

With the best moral and political intentions in the world, one<br />

may come to refuse the mad the -right to be mad; the claim that<br />

"society is to blame" can disguise a way of suppressing all<br />

deviance. Institutional negation would then become a denegation­<br />

Verneinung in the Freudian sense-of the singular fact of<br />

derangement. Before taking out an option on nosography, Freud<br />

devoted himself to really giving a voice to neurotics, freeing them<br />

from all the effects of suggestion. Giving up the idea of medical<br />

suggestion in order to fall into collective suggestion would only<br />

create an illusory benefit.<br />

I think that Basaglia and his comrades might be led incisively<br />

beyond some of their current formulations and to "bend" their ears<br />

to mental alienation without systematically reducing it to social<br />

alienation. Matters are relatively straightforward and rightfully<br />

violent when it is a matter of repudiating repressive institutions.<br />

Things are much more difficult when they concern our understanding<br />

122 ;

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