ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I analyze the forms and function of lyric poetry in psychiatric settings drawing on Alda Merini (1931–2009), an Italian woman poet and patient who was incarcerated in a mental asylum for 10 years (1965–75). Twenty years after her hospitalization, she described her experience in two works of lyrical prose, poetry, and letters addressed to a fellow patient and lover. The publication of these poetic works followed the emanation of the Basaglia Law, the Italian Mental Health Act of 1978, which contained directives for the closing down of all psychiatric hospitals in Italy. I demonstrate that Merini’s poetry entertained a passionate dialogue with Franco Basaglia’s thought and that of other psychiatrists of this time, thereby revealing moments of anticipation, overlap, and/or friction between poetic and psychiatric imagination. The chapter reveals the radical role of poetry in the making of psychiatric knowledge, especially when this knowledge is produced by women or other subjectivities confronted with questions of power. Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice is applied to the poetic field for the first time to develop a lyrical psychiatry challenging hierarchies of knowledge between patients and health providers, poetic writing, and psychiatric science.
