“We Cannot See Ourselves Reflected in All Italian Institutions”: Reform Psychiatry, Habsburg Legacies, and Identity-Making in the Upper Adriatic Area

Toncich, Francesco (2025) “We Cannot See Ourselves Reflected in All Italian Institutions”: Reform Psychiatry, Habsburg Legacies, and Identity-Making in the Upper Adriatic Area. HUNGARIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW: NEW SERIES OF ACTA HISTORICA ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARIUM HUNGARICAE, 14 (4). pp. 615-654. ISSN 2063-8647

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Abstract

This article analyses the development of criticisms of psychiatric institutions and restraint-based treatments for psychiatric and neurological patients as a foundation for identity-making processes in the Upper Adriatic from a long-term perspective. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the region, which was once part of the Habsburg Empire but was by then divided between Italy and Yugoslavia, became a hub for the deinstitutionalization of a psychiatric system still burdened by its Fascist legacy. This reform fostered renewed identity-making within local society, rooted in early Habsburgera psychiatry. As early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Austrian psychiatry in this region had embraced non-restraint and outpatient therapies based on the liberal idea of modernity, which exerted a lasting influence on the psychiatric institutions in Trieste and Gorizia. World War I and the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy brought Italian rule, under which Fascism transformed psychiatry into a tool of repression, eradicating alternative treatments and creating a clash between psychiatric cultures. This clash became foundational to the development of an identitarian model, rooted in Habsburg nostalgia and a presumed local “tradition” of alternative psychiatry during periods of profound crisis and transformation, particularly the reforms in the institutional world of psychiatry in the 1960s–70s.

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