Blue Library
9850 L’alienista
Machado de Assis. Introduction by Giovanni Mariotti
1976 / 108 PAGES.
Language: Italian
The Alienist subtly and sarcastically reveals the insidious and fanatical nature of the so-called psychiatric sciences; it touches on their collusion with political power and exposes the arbitrary practices upon which insane asylums are based.
Forestalling his time (the late 19th century), Machado de Assis embraces the theme of mental disorders within the heart of his narrative and develops it, with subtle irony, to highlight the greatness and infamies of psychiatric power and the bipolarity of modern medical practice, split between the myth of schizophrenia and the no less legendary myth of paranoia. The protagonist is Dr Simão Bacamarte, one of the most farsighted exponents of scientific reason who, through his dedication and commitment to the field of psychoanalysis, obtained permission to build an asylum in the town of Itaguí, Colombia, which would be called Casa Verde. Imprisoned within his own scientific rigor, he first locked up the “eccentric”, then the “normal”, thus enacting a Copernican revolution in psychiatric therapy and ultimately, in an act of self-sabotage, voluntarily confined himself until his death. Self-seclusion becomes the final meaning of every clinical and political gaze, thereby breaking the power relations visibly exercised in the “Bastille of human reason”, a place of imprisonment with neither words nor rebellion.