Trivelli, Elena. 2013. Assembling memories and affective practices around the psychiatric history of Gorizia :A study of a remembering crisis. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This thesis examines the vicissitudes around psychiatric practice in the Italian city of Gorizia, from the 1960s to the present day. It addresses the work of alternative psychiatry initiated by Franco Basaglia in the city, in the early 1960s, and how this work has been remembered in the local community across the decades.

It is an interdisciplinary qualitative case study research based on an ethnography I
conducted in Gorizia between 2011 and 2012, which has primarily involved archival research, formal interviews and informal conversations with some of the protagonists of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation in the city.

I analyse how elements such as narratives around ‘Basaglia in Gorizia’, public events and health care approaches, as well as the state of several locales and resources in official archives, are informed by fractured and contrasting understandings of the meaning of ‘the Basaglia experience’, and I frame such cleavages in terms of a ‘remembering crisis’. Within the scarcity of historical research that has been conducted on the psychiatric history of Gorizia, I suggest that these cleavages are crucial for an analysis of the cyclical erasures, rewritings and forms of ‘removal’ that are structural features in remembering ‘the Basaglia experience’ in the city.

The research is situated in the field of cultural studies. It examines an archive of crisis and it explores the ways in which such crisis is transmitted and circulates across the decades in the community, affecting interpretations of the past and current social and affective practices. I simultaneously draw upon and make a contribution to the fields of affect studies, psychosocial studies, trauma studies, and human geography.

My contribution is both theoretical and methodological. In suggesting ways of engaging with a haunted sociality and the psychic significance of a remembering crisis, I advance innovative epistemologies of the unconscious, and I formulate a non representational approach to social research.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Keywords:	History of psychiatry, basaglia, affect, assemblage, trauma
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Date:	2013
Item ID:	9923
Date Deposited:	07 Mar 2014 12:58
Last Modified:	08 Sep 2022 08:57
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/9923

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