ABSTRACT
The work of opening up the hospital at Gorizia — what Basaglia considered a typical ‘violent total institution’ housing Italian and Slavic patients from rural and working class backgrounds — represented a crisis in both the institution of Italian psychiatry and its body of knowledge. Economic and social marginalization was becoming a mass phenomenon; institutions and their relationships to production had been challenged by workers and students. The labor movement had moved from a focus on wage demands to challenging virtually all aspects of everyday life. The Trieste psychiatrists set up a 24-hour emergency service, in the emergency room. They refused to normalize situations by simply agreeing to commit someone, but instead called into question the expropriation of power from the potential patient. This caused everyone involved, including the doctors from the general hospital, to look for solutions other than the separation or exclusion of the suffering person. It also broke that alliance between the judiciary and psychiatry.
