Marx and Basaglia: Reforming Psychiatry and Society

In this paper, we discuss some insights from Basaglia’s psychiatric research that help us identify and support the most promising aspects of Marx’s ethics and his critique of capitalist labor and society. We aim to show that the experiences and values promoted by the Basaglian movement allow us to draw some essential lessons about contemporary society that can be fruitfully applied to socialist thinking. We start out by discussing the complex relationship between work and self-realization within psychiatric institutions and the notion of autonomy, along with their psychological consequences in relation to wellbeing. We then move on to discussing how Basaglian insights and Marxian theory interact at some critical junctures, by spelling out how the psychiatric revolution can inspire social and political change today. Then we focus on the Marxian notions of a person’s unconditional value, cooperation over competition, and paternalism as a mode of power in neoliberalism. Throughout the paper, we emphasize how Basaglia’s work contributes to bringing these values to the fore for the reform of Marxism and society alike, partially by providing us with something akin to an empirical test case for Marxian claims. We end the paper with a brief discussion of the possible impact of Basaglian explanatory pluralism on historical materialism.