Traumatic memory and psychiatric memory. Peppe dell'Acqua and the story of a border asylum

Abstract

The history of asylum internment in Italy is an area of Trauma Studies which has yet to be sufficiently studied. Some considerable issues lie at the core of the discourse: the internment in Italian asylums of thousands of people who were not always mentally ill; the invasive psychiatric treatments to which the inmates were subjected; their expulsion from asylums after the approval of Law 180 in 1978. Furthermore, at the end of the Second World War another trauma was the internment of exiles from Istria in the Trieste and Gorizia asylums. In those years, psychiatrists, hospital staff, and inmates were both witnesses to and victims of this phase of transition. This caused, on the one hand, the aphasia and silence of patients and former inmates; on the other, psychiatrists at times became authors of a testimonial psychiatric narration, also expressed in theatrical forms. This article focuses on the testimonial writings by Peppe dell’Acqua, a psychiatrist in Franco Basaglia’s team who worked in the San Giovanni asylum in Trieste between 1973 and 1980 and authored the piece (tra parentesi). La vera storia di un’improbabile liberazione (2019).