Alessandra Diazzi – författare

Over the post-war decades, Italy's 'extroverted' cultural identity was mostly oriented towards social and political questions: the inward turn of psychoanalysis was regarded with suspicion, as a fin-de-siècle cure for middle-class neuroses. The consulting room was, for militant intellectuals, antithetic to class-consciousness and the collective struggle. But despite this resistance from leftist, or Communist, intellectual discourse, psychoanalysis became steadily more influential.

In the period up to the late 1970s, the triad of politics-ideology-commitment acted as a threefold track through which psychoanalysis could spread, and the resistance to it transformed Italy into a unique cultural laboratory for experimental negotiation between analysis and Marxism. Many of these encounters occurred in post-war literature, and Diazzi maps out a distinctively Italian, ideological repurposing of psychoanalysis, turning its inward view into an outward tool of political agency.

The Years of Alienation in Italy offers an interdisciplinary overview of the socio-political, psychological, philosophical, and cultural meanings that the notion of alienation took on in Italy between the 1960s and the 1970s. It addresses alienation as a social condition of estrangement caused by the capitalist system, a pathological state of the mind and an ontological condition of subjectivity. Contributors to the edited volume explore the pervasive influence this multifarious concept had on literature, cinema, architecture, and photography in Italy. The collection also theoretically reassesses the notion of alienation from a novel perspective, employing Italy as a paradigmatic case study in its pioneering role in the revolution of mental health care and factory work during these two decades.