AttraversaMenti [Crossings]: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Experience of the Former Psychiatric Hospital in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto

Caterina Benelli

Investigation

;Giovanna Costanzo

Investigation

;Roberta Pandolfino

Investigation

;Vinicio Busacchi

Data Curation

2023-01-01

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Abstract

In the last century, Goffman defined prisons as places of residence and work for groups of people who share a common predicament, spending part of their lives under a closed regime, whose all-embracing nature is manifested in the blocking of social exchange and any relations with the outside world (Goffman 1961: 11). Comprehen-sive, all-encompassing institutions where, from a Foucauldian per-spective, a strong bureaucratic organisation manages mass groups of individuals, exerting strict control over them to the point of shaping their actions, relationships and very identity; a disciplinary and puni-tive regime, structured to produce a specific kind of citizen (Foucault 1975: 135). This is a clear but far too rigid an analysis to reflect what is today the submerged, we might say hidden, reality of Italian and in-ternational prisons. In order to understand the experience of impris-onment today, it is more helpful to refer to places of confinement (Pandolfino 2022), where it is necessary to look not only at institu-tions or places, but also at the relations between sites, practices, so-cial relations and subjective states of mind (Jefferson 2014: 49).