The Negated Institution: Report from a Psychiatric Hospital was first published in 1968 in Italian and caused an immediate sensation. It was an instant bestseller and was translated into numerous languages, but never into English. Edited by the Venetian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, the book is a collection of writings, interviews, and debates which tell the story of the transformation of the Psychiatric Hospital in Gorizia, on the northeast border of Italy, into an open and “negated” institution. This story of an historically unique process of de-institutionalization—with the elimination of walls and barriers, the humanization of the hospital, the introduction of debates and meetings, the unlocking of wards, and the questioning of the very basis of all psychiatric hospitals—struck a nerve with the student and worker movements of 1968. It also gave a voice to the patients themselves, telling their stories of violence but also of liberation.

The Negated Institution was highly sensitive to the contradictions of this project of opening up and negation, and called for the abolition of the entire system of psychiatric asylums, as well as new ways of understanding and contextualising mental illness and mental health. It led to debates in many countries within and outside of psychiatry and played a part in the 1978 “Basaglia law,” which eventually closed down the entire psychiatric hospital system in Italy—the first example of such total closure in the world, which endures to our contemporary moment.

This is the first translation into English of this seminal text. The translator, John Foot, is an expert in the life and work of Franco Basaglia and has added notes and a critical introduction.

About the Editors

Franco Basaglia (1924-1980) was a psychiatrist and mental health administrator, as well as an author and political organizer. After qualifying in medicine at Padua University and specialising in psychiatry, he was Director of the Psychiatric Hospital in Gorizia from 1961-1969, Director of the Psychiatric Hospital of Colorno (Parma) from 1969-1971, and Director of the Psychiatric Hospital in Trieste from 1971-1978. He then ran the mental health services in the Region of Lazio from 1978 until his death in 1980 from a brain tumor. He was the author of numerous articles and volumes, many co-written or co-edited with his wife Franca Ongaro, including Che cos’è la psichiatria (1967); L’Istituzione negata. Rapporto da un ospedale psichiatrico (1968), Morire di Classe (with Franca Ongaro, 1969); La maggioranza deviante (with Franca Ongaro, 1971); and Crimini di Pace (with Franca Ongaro, 1975). After his death, his lectures given in Brazil were published as the Conferenze Brasiliane (1979) and his collected writings were published in two volumes as Scritti, edited by Franca Ongaro (1981, republished in 2023).

John Foot is Professor of Modern Italian History in the Department of Italian, University of Bristol. He has published a number of books and articles relating to contemporary Italian history and politics, as well as many translations from Italian into English. He worked for a number of years on the life and history of Franco Basaglia and the radical psychiatry movement he inspired, research which was published as The Man Who Closed the Asylums: Franco Basaglia and the Revolution in Mental Health Care (Verso, 2015) as well as an edited volume with Tom Burns, Basaglia’s International Legacy: From Asylum to Community (Oxford, 2020).

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