ORIGINAL PAPER THE CULTURAL REPERTOIRE OF FRANCO BASAGLIA AND THE COMPARATIVE CRITIQUE OF PSYCHIATRY Giovanni Matera, PhD1 ISSN: 2283-8961 Abstract Can we consider Franco Basaglia as “the man who closed the asylums” or would it be more appropriate to refer to him as the spokesperson of a large group of professionals and instances? My thesis underlines the collective work carried out by a group of psychiatric professionals in the 1960s and the 1970s. Their acknowledgement of experiences drawing from different cultural repertoires allowed them to transform psychiatric services into a democratic institution. The paper develops through three sections which help us to understand the connection between the work of Basaglia and other western countries, especially France. 1) The circulation of knowledge among western countries has contributed to the production of “cultural repertoires of evaluation” available in all these western countries in an uneven way but based on a common sense of injustice. 2) Drawing from the work of sociologist Robert Castel, I will examine the relation between the group of Basaglia and the “secteur” model, available in France since the end of the Second World War. 3) I will eventually analyze some 1 Sociologist, associate member at Centre Georg Simmel – EHESS
[email protected] Rivista di Psichiatria e Psicoterapia Culturale, Vol. VIII, n. 2, Novembre 2020 The cultural repertoire of Franco Basaglia 2 G Matera interviews released in the 1970s in which Franco Basaglia and his colleagues discuss the connection between their experiments and the ones conducted in other western countries. Key words: Community Psychiatry, Franco Basaglia, Pragmatic Sociology, Cultural Sociology, Cultural Repertoires of Evaluation.