The psychotherapy of psychoses and psychiatric institutions. Intro

Abstract

This issue contains the proceedings of the Conference The psychotherapy of psychosis and psychiatric institutions, promoted by the journal “Il sogno della farfalla” and held in Florence on 30th May 2015. The talks start from a brief overview of the history of psychiatric institutions and their importance in so far as psychotherapy is concerned. Pinel and Esquirol considered being committed to an asylum to be the most important therapeutic factor of the “moral treatment”. With alienism adopting organicism as its prevailing model in the second half of the 19th century, mental asylums became institutions of segregation and inhumane treatment. At the end of the 1960s a process of critique towards the institutions began which tried to free the patients from the institutions believing to thereby put an end to the problem of mental illness. Massimo Fagioli’s Birth Theory offers a new approach to the reality of psychiatric institutions and makes the psychotherapy of psychosis possible.