The Personal Is Political: Micro-history of a Slogan and Its Role Within the Italian Radical Psychiatry Movement in the 1960s and 1970s

This chapter takes as a starting point the influential slogan ‘the personal is political’, and Paul Ginsborg’s deep interest throughout his work and life in issues linked to collective and individual protest, the role of the family in political life in Italy, and the problems and issues raised by political commitment, themes which have been part of many of his works, from his A History of Contemporary Italy, to his monumental Family Politics, to his more autobiographical The Politics of Everyday Life. The first part of the chapter looks to define and unpack the history and meaning of this slogan. This analysis is then applied to a micro-history of the way they various meanings of this slogan played out in one specific movement—the radical psychiatrists of the 1960s and 1970s in Italy. How did the personal and the political (variously defined) connect, intersect, overlap and clash within this particular context, and how were these spheres viewed at the time and afterwards by the protagonists of the movement? Specifically, the article concentrates on the ways in which the leaders of that movement—Franco Basaglia and Giovanni Jervis—narrated and understood the personal and political within that influential movement at the time and in retrospect.