Massimo Fagioli has left us

Massimo Fagioli, the psychiatrist of Collective Analysis, who passed away this morning at the age of 85, dedicated his entire life to researching the birth and origins of human thought.

Human life has a beginning and an end, he said. Massimo Fagioli, the psychiatrist of Collective Analysis, who passed away this morning at the age of 85 in Rome, dedicated his entire life to researching the birth and origins of human thought. Fagioli was born in Monte Giberto in 1931, in the province of Ascoli Piceno. The author of 23 books, he is best known for "Death Instinct and Knowledge," his theoretical masterpiece, written in 1970. Tens of thousands of copies of his work have been published and translated into many languages. It encompasses the fundamental discoveries of the Theory of Birth, with which the psychiatrist fundamentally revolutionized knowledge of the human mind, beginning with the discovery of the biological origin of the unconscious. On Saturday, February 18, starting at 10:00 a.m., a tribute to Massimo Fagioli will be held at Via Roma Libera 23 in Trastevere, where for forty-one years he held his Analisi collettiva seminars, highly original, one-of-a-kind group psychotherapy sessions, offered free of charge and without distinction to thousands of people. The Left website, the magazine for which the psychiatrist has edited the "Transformation" column since 2006, also dedicates a lengthy tribute to Fagioli. A physician specializing in neuropsychiatry in Modena, Fagioli graduated from the University of Rome with a degree in Medicine and Surgery. He pursued this study out of a need to understand the human psyche, a pursuit he began in his teens, after serving as a boy in the Marche region alongside partisans in the Resistance War, and his father, a field doctor. He arrives in Venice, at the ancient asylum on the island of San Clemente, where he has his first contact with the chronically ill, the white wards, and the electroshock treatments. In the library's old medical records, he discovers that two words prevail in descriptions of the mentally ill: "stulid, emotionless." From the anguished practices of nineteenth-century psychiatry, which sought answers in slides of brain sections, Fagioli then moved to the psychiatric hospital in Padua. Here, the practice of a sophisticated clinic and the approach to serious illnesses using methods that were cutting-edge for the time, including insulin therapy, provided the opportunity to conduct his first experiences of active psychiatry with groups of patients, whom the young doctor was able to take out for walks in the city, "breaking down" the walls of the asylum. In the early 1960s, Fagioli's research into the causes of mental illness shifted to the unconscious, taking him to Binswanger's Bellevue Clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where he ran the Italian-speaking therapeutic community, living day and night with the patients without mediation. Only after a long personal analysis and about ten years as an analyst with a medical practice of individual therapy, in 1971 he proposed to scientific circles the results of his experiences and his training in the book Death Instinct and Knowledge, written in 1970, published in a new edition by L'asino d'oro in 2010 and subsequently also in German, forty years later, in 2011, by the publisher Stroemfeld (Todestrieb und Erkenntnis). The book contains the foundations of the Theory of Birth, according to which human thought begins at birth with the reaction to light, through the retina, of the newborn's body: discoveries later developed in The Marionette and the Burattino and Theory of Birth and Human Castration, of 1974, published between the end of the same year and 1975. Since 1975 Fagioli has responded to the demand for psychotherapy from hundreds of people and has trained, first at the Institute of Psychiatry of the University of Rome La Sapienza and then in a very large private practice in Trastevere (1980), the seminars of Collective Analysis, a treatment practice for the healing of mental illness, based on the interpretation of dreams, which continues as research on human reality and its evolution. His fourth volume of interviews, Bambino donna e trasformazione dell'uomo, was published in 1979. Fagioli continued to develop and deepen the theoretical foundations of 1970-74 in a series of other writings on psychiatry and through free expressions in the artistic field. In 1997 he directed Il cielo della luna (The Moonlight), followed by Me'lange (1999) and La psichiatria, esiste? (Does Psychiatry Exist?) (2002). The psychiatry and psychotherapy journal Il sogno della farfalla (The Butterfly's Dream), which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2012, refers to his theoretical work and practice. In addition to the fundamental volumes on the Theory of Birth (Death Instinct and Knowledge, The Marionette and the Puppet, The Theory of Birth and Human Castration, Child, Woman and the Transformation of Man), his other titles are: Storia di una ricerca (Lezioni 2002), Una vita irrazionale (Lezioni 2006), Das Unbewusste. The Unknowable (Lectures 2003), Disappearance Fantasy (Lectures 2007), Left 2006, Left 2007, New Thought (Lectures 2004), Left 2008, The Man in the Courtyard (Lectures 2005), Left 2009, Seventh Year (Lectures 2008), Left 2010, Religion, Reason and Freedom (Lectures 2009), Left 2011, The Idea of ​​Human Birth (Lectures 2010) and Left 2012