Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
PRI
Founded in 1895, the Italian Republican Party (Partito repubblicano italiano, PRI) had a
radical anti-monarchist, anti-clerical and later uncompromisingly anti-fascist tradition. It
was at that time a left-liberal party, unlike the PLI. Furthermore, although pro-US and
pro-market, it believed in a reformist capitalism, regarding Italian ‘historical capitalism’
as in need of state intervention, especially with regard to the South. The party benefited
from the DC’s centrist coalition strategy and became an influential government party.
Strategically, its leaders, notably the Sicilian Ugo La Malfa, exploited the party’s hinge
position between the Centre and Left in order to support the governmentalization of the
PSI and the attempted integration of the PCI. In 1981, Republican party leader Giovanni
Spadolini became the first non-DC premier. The party was largely destroyed in the early
1990s crisis, but a rump survived as one of the several tiny parties in the new party
system.
Further reading
Donovan, M. (1996) ‘The Fate of the Secular Centre: The Liberals, Republicans and Social
Democrats’, in S.Gundle and S.Parker (eds), The New Italian Republic: From the Fall of the
Berlin Wall to Berlusconi, London: Routledge (an over-view of the nature and role of the party
in the ‘First’ Republic).
MARK DONOVAN
private television
Private television came late to Italy but when it did, it thoroughly transformed the
television model which had been created by the public broadcaster, the RAI, during its
two decades of monopoly under Ettore Bernabei. Private television began modestly in
1972 with Tele Biella, a cable channel in a little town near Turin broadcasting locally to
about 100 subscribers. Invoking the RAI’s presumed monopoly over all broadcasting, the
government moved to close the station down, but a legal wrangle ensued and the matter
eventually came before the Constitutional Court.
At that time, the legislative situation regarding television was something of a desert
(see broadcasting). In 1952, a decree by the Minister for Post and Telecommunications,
Giuseppe Spataro, had assured the RAI a monopoly over television broadcasting for the
next twenty years. However, when the Tele Biella case came before it in July 1973, the
Constitutional Court ruled against the legality of the decree and thus opened the
floodgates to private broadcasting. Many private television channels opened in 1974 and
1975: TeleFirenze started to relay programmes from Tele Capodistria and ORTF, the
second French channel, and Telemontecarlo began transmitting into Northern Italy from
Entries A–Z 671
Monaco. Then, with Law 103 of 1975, the government effectively deregulated all radio
and television. For a relatively small licence fee, any Italian (or European) citizen could
now set up a private radio or television channel, although transmission was still restricted
to local areas with severe prohibitions against networking in order to avoid any rival
national coverage. The number of channels grew rapidly: in 1976 there were ninety
private broadcasters but by 1978 the number had increased to 360 and by 1983 RAI
estimates put it at almost 800. In spite of all this growth, however, the government
proposed no legislation in order to regulate the new phenomenon.
In its early period, the private television system was organized in three different ways.
The ‘independent televisions’, such as Antenna 3 in Milan produced their own
programmes and collected advertising revenues. The ‘circuit’ channels delivered
programmes and advertising to many different television stations, whilst the ‘networks’,
exploiting a legal loophole and imitating the American model, transmitted programmes
simultaneously through the use of videotapes and by aerial systems to ever wider areas.
The real penetration of private television remained a mystery until 1979, when a report
revealed that the private channels had accumulated 20 per cent of the share, a real
revolution in Italian television viewing habits. This meant that private television had
become big business and, accordingly, the giants stepped in.
In 1979 Silvio Berlusconi, a building magnate and successful entrepreneur, founded
Rete Italia and Publitalia, to develop programmes, buy movies and sell advertising.
TeleMilano, his first cable channel, became Canale Cinque as it networked with
seventeen other private channels and acquired technical facilities equal to those of the
RAI itself. In a final brilliant move, Berlusconi attracted the legendary Mike Bongiorno
away from the RAI, followed a year later by popular presenters Raimondo and Corrado
Vianello, thus creating a real alternative to public television.
The Berlusconi story, with all its links to Italian politics and to foreign capital, was
certainly the most striking and the most successful in the long term, but Berlusconi was
not alone: the new television business attracted quite a number of large investors and,
especially, the interest of the great publishing houses. Angelo Rizzoli founded Prima Rete
Indipendente, Mondadori founded Rete Quattro and Rusconi established Italia Uno.
Rizzoli abandoned television in 1981 following the P2 scandal as the first shots began to
be fired in the great ‘private television war’ between Canale Cinque, ReteQuattro, Italia
Uno and Euro TV (the latter being a network founded by Calisto Tanzi, owner of the
dairy giant Parmalat, and close friend of DC secretary and sometime Prime Minister,
Ciriaco De Mita). The decisive battles were won by Berlusconi’s Fininvest company,
which acquired Italia Uno in 1983 and ReteQuattro in the following year. This effectively
created a dualistic system with political implications, with the Christian Democrats at the
helm of the RAI and the Socialist Party aligning itself with Fininvest. A crucial point was
reached in October 1984 when several judges and magistrates moved to close down
Berlusconi’s channels in some cities, claiming that the Fininvest network breached legal
restrictions on broadcasting nationally. A few days later, however, a decree by the
Socialist Prime Minister, Bettino Craxi (followed by another in February 1985), re-
opened Berlusconi’s channels. The absence of any clear laws regulating television
broadcasting was again highlighted as Berlusconi now established a de facto ‘duopoly’
with the RAI.
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 672
The late 1980s thus saw an intensification of the television wars between Berlusconi’s
Fininvest network and the RAI as Auditel began to publish its daily analyses of audience
share. In 1987, after many years at the RAI, Pippo Baudo moved to Fininvest as artistic
director. The RAI replied by increasing investments, especially in the third channel,
which was largely the province of the Communist Party. Under the direction of Biagio
Agnes, the public network regained some ground and Pippo Baudo came back to the RAI
in April 1989. Berlusconi also lost the first round of a contest with De Benedetti for the
property of Mondadori, and with Tanzi for Euro TV, which was soon transformed into a
new network named OdeonTV.
A certain peace in the television wars came with the ‘Mammì law’ in 1990 although,
following hard on several years of bitter political wrangling, the law itself turned out to
be a compromise which largely worked in Berlusconi’s favour. RAI and Fininvest could
both retain three channels. Fininvest would have to divest itself of some of its newspaper
interests, but in recompense it would now be allowed to legally interconnect stations and
broadcast live, thus achieving its aim of becoming an alternative national television
network to the public broadcaster. Needless to say, Berlusconi’s successful campaign for
Prime Minister in 1994 passed through all the television screens controlled by Fininvest.
In 1995, a referendum to abrogate the Mammì law failed, and in the following year
Fininvest was transformed into Mediaset, a listed holding company with shares held by,
among others, Rupert Murdoch and Leo Kirch. Thus in the late 1990s, the Italian
television sky is effectively a ‘duopoly’, divided almost equally between the RAI and
Mediaset, with the Cecchi Gori Group and its Telemontecarlo network attempting, with
little success, to create a ‘third pole’.
Further reading
Fiori, G. (1995) Il venditore. Storia di Silvio Berlusconi e della Fininvest (The Salesman: A History
of Silvio Berlusconi and Fininvest), Milan, Garzanti.
Giacalone, D. (1992) La guerra delle antenne (The Broadcasting War), Milan: Sperling & Kupfer.
Grasso, A. (1992) Storia della televisione italiana (The History of Italian Television), Milan:
Garzanti.
Monteleone, F. (1992) Storia della radio e della televisione in Italia (The History of Radio and
Television in Italy), Venice: Marsilio.
Noam, E. (1991) Television in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press (for Italy, see ch. 9).
Wolf, M. (1989) ‘Italy from Deregulation to a New Equilibrium’ in The European Experience, ed.
G. Nowell-Smith, London: BFI.
RICCARDO VENTRELLA
privatization and nationalization
As a means of reforming corporate ownership, privatization entered the Italian political
agenda in the early 1990s, but actual privatizations only began from 1992–3 onwards.
Thus, since state-owned banks and enterprises represented a major part of Italian
Entries A–Z 673
economy since the interwar years, the early 1980s might be considered the beginning of a
new epoch.
The expansion of state-owned enterprises in Italy was a result both of deliberate
political decisions and historical accidents, and followed different organizational patterns.
Railways were nationalized after a long political debate in 1905 and a state company,
Ferrovie dello Stato (State Railways), was created as an autonomous organization within
the public administration under the control of the Ministry of Public Works (see railway
systems). INA (Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni/National Insurance Institute) was
created in 1912 to manage a state monopoly of life insurances (never actually enforced)
and marked a major innovation: it was established as a state concern but had an
autonomous legal status and operated as a private business outside the public
administration. In the interwar period, the Fascist regime adopted the INA formula to
establish new banking institutions such as IMI (Istituto Mobiliare Italiano) in 1931, in
order to finance private big business with long-term industrial credit. This approach was
further developed with the setting up of IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, or
Institute for Industrial Reconstruction) in 1933, a new state-owned holding which took
over banks shattered by the Great Depression (Banca Commerciale Italiana, Credito
Italiano, Banco di Roma) and all their industrial securities, thus becoming the leading
shareholder of a heterogeneous group of large enterprises (shipping, steel, mechanics and
shipbuilding, telephones, electricity) which accounted for a major part of Italian industry.
In the early postwar period, IRI was reorganized and it then successfully carried out
the modernization of strategic sectors such as steel (see Italsider), telecommunications
(through STET), electromechanics and motorways (see autostrada network). Stemming
from AGIP (Azienda Generale Italiana Petroli, or General Italian Petroleum Agency),
which had been created in 1926 by the Fascist regime as a state-private joint venture,
ENI was created in 1953 as a state monopoly of natural gas after an epic dispute with
American oil multinationals (see Enrico Mattei), and it quickly became an international
oil giant, playing a leading role in the Italian economic miracle’. A new form of political
control over the state-owned system took shape in 1956, when a Ministry for State
Shareholdings was established; the chain was further strengthened during the 1960s
through a number of interministerial committees, so that state-owned enterprises became
officially a means of enforcing economic planning and southern industrialization. Finally,
in 1962 the centre-left government nationalized electricity (which had been managed by
five powerful private groups) and ENEL (Ente Nazionale Energia Elettrica), a giant
company which monopolized production and distribution, was set up as a state company
outside the state shareholding system.
The economic crisis of the 1970s forced the state to play an anticyclical role, mainly
by nationalizing sick private concerns, maintaining high levels of employment and
investing heavily in declining capital-intensive sectors (such as steel and petrochemicals),
especially in the South. At the same time, other state holdings such as EFIM (Ente per il
Finanziamento dell’Industria Meccanica, or Agency for Financing Mechanical Industry)
and EGAM (Ente per la Gestione delle Aziende Minerarie, or Agency for the
Management of Mineral Firms) emerged as terminal care hospices for mechanical and
mining enterprises. By this time the state-owned system had become a giant
conglomerate with disastrous economic and financial performances, a situation further
worsened by mediocre (if not worse) managers, usually loyal only to political parties of
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 674
the government coalitions which had become ‘hidden shareholders’ of such enterprises.
As a result, a large part of the state-owned system was increasingly dependent on
government endowments, which burdened the national budget with heavy losses and
drew sharp criticism from Italy’s European partners.
1992 thus marked a turning point as IRI, ENI and ENEL were transformed into limited
companies owned by the Ministry of Treasury, and the Amato government endorsed a
general plan for public holdings and banks to be privatized. In the following years,
subsequent governments stressed the importance of privatization as a means of reducing
the national deficit and spreading shareholding to small savers. However, privatizations
might more accurately be seen as a major result of the political changes brought about by
Tangentopoli and the collapse of traditional parties in 1992–4. In fact a number of public
managers proved to have been involved in corruption (see Mani pulite), so that
privatization appeared the easiest way of breaking relations between economy and
politics once and forever. Public opinion pushed this change forward energetically in
1993 by giving overwhelming support to a referendum which proposed abolishing the
Ministry for State Shareholdings. Nevertheless, several crucial questions about how to
privatize remained unsolved. Supporters of the public company model (the British way of
privatizing through a severe fragmentation of shareholding) looked to privatizations as a
form of economic democracy and a way of enlarging the Italian stock exchange, while
supporters of the French model considered a stable command group a better strategy. The
long-winded dispute produced no clear winner, and Italian governments have privileged a
case by case approach.
As a result, pragmatism has become the keynote of Italian-style privatizations. Credito
Italiano (Italian Credit) and Banca Commerciale Italiana (Italian Commercial Bank) had
to be officially transformed into public companies, but just after their privatization in
1993–4 strong controlling groups emerged, the former was drawn into the circle of
Allianz, a German insurance group, while the latter fell under the control of a group
bound to Mediobanca and its allies. In other cases, such as INA and IMI, privatizations
simply implied conveyance to San Paolo di Torino, another public bank (although linked
to major private partners) to form a leading banking and insurance group. Other major
banks to be privatized were Banca di Roma and Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in 1997–8.
The largest privatizations proved to be those of ENI and Telecom Italia (see STET),
completed in 1997. Both found overwhelming favour with retail and institutional
investors. However, the state kept a golden share in both companies which still gives the
Treasury a major influence in appointing directors and determining strategy. In fact, the
real lesson from Italian privatizations seems to be that changing ownership is not an
economic reform in itself.
As directives from the European Union enforced a liberalization of electricity,
telecommunications, banking and transport markets, monopolies, both privatized (such as
ENI) and still state-owned (such as ENEL and the State Railways) will have to confront
competition within a different regulatory framework determined by new independent
authorities on public utilities (such as the Authority of Electricity and Gas, established in
1995, and the Telecommunications Authority, established in 1998), set up to foster
competition and efficiency and to safeguard consumers’ rights. Such structural change
has only just begun and the final result is very difficult to predict.
Entries A–Z 675
Further reading
Baldassarri, M., Macchiati, A. and Piacentino, D. (eds) (1997) The Privatisation of Public Utilities:
The Case of Italy, London: Macmillan (a collection of papers on actual and ongoing
privatization of public utilities).
Macchiati, A. (1996) Privatizzazioni tra economia e politica (Privatizations Between Economics
and Politics), Rome: Donzelli (a general picture of the economic and institutional change
triggered by privatization policy in the 1990s).
STEFANO BATTILOSSI
Prodi, Romano
b. 7 August 1939, Reggio Emilia
Economist and politician
A graduate of the Catholic University of Milan, Prodi became professor of industrial and
political economics at Bologna University. He was Minister for Industry under Andreotti
(1978–9) and president of IRI (1982–9 and 1993–4), where he carried out some
controversial privatizations and radical restructuring.
In February 1995, Prodi launched L’Ulivo (The Olive Tree Alliance) a centre—left
coalition which aimed to compete for government against Silvio Berlusconi’s Polo della
Liberià. Prodi was in an ideal position to lead such a coalition: he was on the Left but
was neither an ex-communist nor exsocialist, and he was a Catholic but was not too
closely identified with the DC. In economic policy terms, he was a privatizer and one of
the few successful state managers. In 1996, l’Ulivo won the elections and, in record time,
Prodi set up a government which aimed at restructuring Italian welfare and pensions,
introducing some form of federalism and bringing the economy up to EMU criteria. Prodi
succeeded in bringing Italy into line for the single European currency and avoided
parliamentary defeat for two and a half years, despite regular threats from Rifondazione
Comunista which gave his government external support. However, in October 1998 he
lost a budget division by one vote and so resigned. The following year, together with
Antonio Di Pietro, he founded a new party called I Democratici (The Democrats), and
was also nominated President of the European Commission.
JAMES WALSTON
prosciutto
Prosciutto is pork leg, salted and dried. These few words, however, summarize a series of
complex operations in which climatic conditions, environmental factors and, of course,
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 676
professional expertise play a crucial part. The selection of the meat, for instance, requires
specific skills.
After exposure to the air for two to three days, the chosen pork legs go through a
skilful fattrimming procedure. The drying process, before the salting, is carefully
monitored with strict controls on temperature and airing. After this, the prosciutti are
carefully washed and sun exposure then ensures natural drying. The result is the exquisite
prosciutto crudo, not to be confused with prosciutto cotto, where the pork leg is de-
boned, cured, pressed and steam-cooked. Among the most famous Italian prosciutti crudi
are the San Daniele from Friuli and the prosciutto di Parma from the famous town in
Emilia. Prosciutto crudo and rock melon have earned an international reputation as a
delightful hors d’oeuvre.
MARIELLA TOTARO GENEVOIS
PSDI
The PSDI (Partito Social Democratico Italiano, or Italian Social Democratic Party) was
founded when the right wing of the PSIUP, led by Giuseppe Saragat, broke away in
January 1947 at a famous meeting at Rome’s Palazzo Barberini. The new party was
initially called the PSLI, but this was soon changed to PSDI. Its orientation was centrist
and pro-NATO, and as such it was present in most governing coalitions from its
foundation in 1947 to its demise in 1993. On average it polled around 4.5 per cent of the
vote, with a maximum of 7.1 per cent in 1948 and a minimum of 2.7 per cent in 1992. It
was characterized by similar policies and methods to the Christian Democrat Party (see
DC), differentiating itself only in specifically religious or moral matters like abortion. In
1966 the party reunited with the PSI under the banner United Socialist Party (PSU). They
polled 14.5 per cent, 5 per cent less than the two parties had received separately in 1963,
so the parties split again in 1969. Like the other parties of the ‘First’ Republic, the PSDI
sank in 1993 in a sea of debts and legal writs.
JAMES WALSTON
PSI
In opposition from 1947 to 1963, and in government for much of the rest of its life until
1994 when it was officially dissolved, the PSI (Partito Socialista Italiano, or Italian
Socialist Party) was characterized in the first period by strong internal ideological
dissension between reformist and revolutionary wings, in particular between those who
wanted to work with the PCI and those who wanted autonomy In the second period, until
Craxi’s leadership, the divisions were between the pragmatists who wanted to work
within the government and the Left which wanted to maintain an ideological purity.
Entries A–Z 677
These divisions led to a number of splits and mergers. In the final period, despite an
apparent initial success, the PSI became uniformly centrist and increasingly corrupt, until
it finally sank in a sea of debts and arrest warrants resulting from the Tangentopoli
investigations. For fifty years before that, the PSI had navigated a course between the DC
and the PCI, at times risking being overwhelmed by one or the other and at times able to
exploit its pivotal position between the two.
The old pre-Fascist Socialist Party had very little in the way of underground
organization at the time of the fall of Fascism (see fascism and neo-fascism), but in
August 1943 the Socialist old guard came together with two new groups, the Milanese
Movimento di Unità Proletaria (Movement of Proletarian Unity) led by Lelio Basso and
the Roman Unione Proletaria Italiana (Italian Proletarian Union) led by Giuliano Vassalli,
to form the Partito Socialista Italiano di Unità Proletaria (see PSIUP) with Pietro Nenni
as its leader. In the 1946 elections for the Constituent Assembly, it figured as the biggest
party of the Left, leading the PCI by a small margin. However, in 1947 the social
democratic wing of the party broke away to become the PSLI (changed in 1952 into the
PSDI), while what was left became the PSI (Italian Socialist Party). In the national
elections of 1948, the PSI went into an electoral alliance with the PCI as the Popular
Democratic Front (FDP). The move proved massively unsuccessful for the Left (they
won much less in 1948 than the two parties had won separately in 1946) and absolutely
disastrous for the PSI, which was overwhelmed by the Communist Party’s organization.
The setback pressured the party first into striving for organizational independence and
then, increasingly after the Twentieth PCUS conference and the Soviet invasion of
Hungary in 1956, into ideological independence as well. Partly because of these changes
and partly because of the DC’s electoral decline, the PSI began negotiating with the
Catholics in 1960 for places in local government, which eventually led to the first centre-
left national government in 1963 with Nenni as deputy prime minister.
However, the left wing broke away the following year, again taking up the name of
PSIUP; this weakened the PSI’s influence in government, but nonetheless some elements
of their programme were realized, including the nationalization of ENEL, an increase in
the school leaving age and later, the Workers’ Statute, divorce law and, in the 1970s,
various civil rights measures. As a result of the experience of government and of the
PSI’s general move towards the centre, the PSI and the PSDI reunited in 1966. In the
polarized climate of the late 1960s, the result was again disastrous electorally, and so in
1969 they parted company once more.
The early 1970s was a period of confusion for the PSI, with some in the party
enthusiastically taking part in government—which also meant in clientelism and
corruption—and some attempting to remain faithful to socialist principles and traditions.
As the Times put it, when the PSI had made a poor showing in the 1975 regional
elections, the Socialists had ‘disappointed their supporters by the eagerness with which
they leapt onto the gravy train and the mess which some of their leaders made while
spreading it about’ (18 June 1975).
The party left government, although it continued to support the so-called
‘governments of national unity’. Then in 1976, Bettino Craxi was elected secretary.
Initially a compromise candidate, he soon consolidated his position within the party,
maintaining a clear distance from the PCI and emphasizing the PSI’s European social
democratic vocation. In 1980 the Socialists were back in the governing coalition, and in
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 678
1983 Craxi was able to exploit the decline of the DC’s fortunes in order to become prime
minister for the next four years. From then until his political death and legal exile in
1993, Craxi completely dominated the party. Other factions gradually disappeared and
the PSI became a machine for managing power and public resources (see clientelism),
effectively a technological, modernized and media-friendly version of the old DC.
The policy brought some electoral gain, but never the overwhelming success that
Craxi and his supporters had expected. Like the DC, the PSI stood over the changing
Communist Party like a vulture waiting for titbits from the corpse, but in the event it was
the Lega Nord (and the PDS and Rifondazione Comunista) which fed off what
remained of the PSI. In February 1992, the arrest of Mario Chiesa, PSI leader in Milan
and Craxi’s close associate, initiated what came to be known as the Mani pulite (clean
hands) investigations. Craxi would later maintain that it was the whole Italian political
system which was corrupt, not just the PSI, but this did not help save either the party or
its leader. The immediate result of Chiesa’s arrest was that Craxi was no longer prime
minister after the April elections; the next result, following soon after, was that instead of
celebrating its centenary in 1992, the PSI prepared for its own funeral. This took place in
1994 when the rump divided into the Laburisti on the Left, led by Valdo Spini, and the
Socialisti Italiani (SI) on the right led by Ottaviano Del Turco. Other ex-Socialists moved
to either the PDS or Forza Italia. In 1998, some of Craxi’s supporters tried to refound
the party but with scant success.
See also: De Martino; opening to the Left
Further reading
Di Scala, S. (1988) Renewing Italian Socialism: Nenni to Craxi, New York: Oxford University
Press (informative and comprehensive but rather biased in favour of Craxi).
Gundle, S. (1996) ‘The Rise and Fall of Craxi’s Socialist Party’, in S.Gundle and S.Parker (eds),
The New Italian Republic: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi, London: Routledge.
JAMES WALSTON
PSIUP
The PSIUP (Partito Socialista Italiano d’Unità Proletaria, or Italian Socialist Party of
Proletarian Unity) was the official name of the relaunched Socialist party between 1943
and 1947. However, it became better known as the name taken up again by the left wing
which split from what had by then become the Italian Socialist party, or PSI, when the
latter was drawn into government by an alliance with the DC in 1964 (see opening to the
Left). Although the PSIUP survived the 1968 election with 4.5 per cent of the vote, this
plunged to 1.9 per cent in the 1972 elections, despite the party having anticipated many
of the themes of the New Left; which, however, largely preferred extraparliamentary
action (see extraparliamentary Left). Consequently most PSIUP activists joined the
PCI, often occupying its extreme Left. While the PSIUP’s leaders accurately foresaw that
Entries A–Z 679
the new ‘centre—left’ coalition could not effect a transition to socialism, the 1964 split
contributed to the PSI’s subordination to the DC and also deprived the socialists of their
organizational linkages with the working class, thus speeding the party’s transformation
into a southern clientelist and northern ‘yuppie’ party.
MARK DONOVAN
psychoanalysis and psychiatry
Psychoanalysis in Italy has long struggled against powerful cultural, religious and
political opposition: Freud’s declaration that his visit to Rome in 1901 was ‘the crucial
point of my life’ was not locally reciprocated. The Catholic Church was hostile to
confessional competitors; Crocean idealists dismissed it as a ‘pseudo-science; Marxists
had no time for a ‘bourgeois science’; and the Fascist regime was suspicious of the
Jewishness of its leading exponents. Not surprisingly, by the mid-1960s the Italian
Psychoanalytical Society (Freudian, created in 1925), the Association for the Study of
Analytical Psychology (Jungian, 1961) and the Italian Centre for Analytical Psychology
(Jungian, 1966) could count a mere forty analysts, concentrated in Rome and Milan. Only
after the ‘cultural revolution’ of 1968–9 and the subsequent expansion of psychology as a
university discipline could psychoanalysis and its therapies begin to find a significant
market. By 1991, 726 Freudian and 495 Jungian analysts were at work, managing
roughly 12,000 patients. Outside these traditional institutions even more spectacular
growth occurred, so that some 30,000 psychotherapists of varying persuasions and
respectability were treating 350,000 patients. Doubts about the nature of some therapies
led in 1989 to the establishment of a professional register for psychologists and
restriction of a licence to practice psychotherapy to those with a psychology degree and
four years’ postgraduate training.
The demand for psychoanalysis in the 1980s was greatly increased by psychiatrists in
search of a new professional knowledge base. Since the nineteenth century, emphasis on
the biological basis of mind and evolution exemplified by Cesare Lombroso and his
followers—had aligned psychiatry with medicine: people diagnosed as mentally ill were
consigned to long stays in asylums. In Italy as elsewhere, the 1960s brought a widespread
challenge to all forms of institutionalization, producing major changes in psychiatric
practice. Already by 1960 patient stays in asylums were becoming shorter, and in some
cities (Gorizia, Trieste, Arezzo, Perugia) the writings and practice of Franco Basaglia
had inspired the replacement of custodial regimes by community care programmes. In
1978, the deinstitutionalizing trend was accelerated by law 180, which ordered a halt to
all admissions to mental hospitals. The law remained controversial, partly because its
critics confused problems of design with problems of implementation, and partly because
evidence from north, centre and south produced quite contrasting assessments. Critics
underlined the lack of professional preparation for the reform in many parts of Italy,
particularly the south; but in the centre and north the reforms worked well and the
improvements they brought were not outweighed by negative side effects (for example,
the suicide rate did not increase).
Encyclopedia of contemporary italian culture 680