Chaosophy - autonomous learning

system. This current started in Italy with Franco Basaglia who,
beginning in 1961, gave a very different direction to his hospital in
Gorizia. Basaglia challenged the principle of keeping mental
patients under surveillance and decided to open all the services of
his hospital. He called into question every compartmentalization
and substituted for them general meetings open to all.
In a climate of political radicalization favorable to the emergence
of alternative and protest movements in Italy in the 1960s,
the brand of antipsychiatry practiced by Basaglia assumed a
noticeable role. Its explicit objective was to destroy the institution.
Guattari did not follow Basaglia's most extreme positions and
wondered in 1970 if they were not a "headlong rush" or a "desperate
sort"28 of attempt. Guattari in addition criticized as exaggerated and
irresponsible some of Basaglia's positions, like his refusal to give
medicines to his patients, alleging that it would inhibit himself
from entering a true relation with them. Guattari wondered even if
one didn't end up, with these best intentions, refusing the mad the
right to be mad. Basaglia's institutional negation would prove to be
a denial, in the Freudian sense, of the singularity of mental illnesses.
The movement Basaglia launched later on, called "Psichiatria
Democratica," would go as far as calling for the outright suppression
of psychiatric hospitals.
The other large branch of antipsychiatry, represented by
Ronald Laing and David Cooper, is British.29 Guattari met them
during a conference called "Journees de l' enfance alienee" organized
in 1967 by Maud Mannoni and featuring Jacques Lacan. The proceedings
of these two days were published in two issues of the
journal Recherches directed by Guattari.30 But he was not convinced
by their antipsychiatric practice either. He considered them to be
trapped in the Oedipal schema which he tried to surpass with
Deleuze by publishing Anti-Oedipus. Soon after, he did his best to
deconstruct the Anglo-Saxon experiment of antipsychiatry.31
20 /