ABSTRACT
One virtue of Basaglia and his associates’ writings on Gorizia is the sense they offer of ongoing work-of a dedicated struggle to push through and beyond the dilemmas they encountered in their psychiatric practice. Gorizia was lived as an experiment, although towards what end no one at the outset really knew. But even as the work remained ‘provisional’, it was carried on in the midst of its contradictoriness. The institution was denied, but of course not abandoned; the patient’s illness was bracketed, but also cared for; therapy was rejected, but still, in less formal or obvious ways, practised (see Basaglia 1968: 373).
