Biography

“Do you like life, professor Fagioli?”
“Life? I do! I’m very well indeed!”
“Have you always liked life?”
“Yes, I have, even when there have been difficult times […]”

Massimo Fagioli (Monte Giberto, May 19^th, 1931 – Rome, February 13^th, 2017), was a psychiatrist and a psychotherapist known for having theorized ‘the disappearance fantasy’ – the bedrock of what he himself called ‘Human Birth Theory’ – and for the seminars of Analisi collettiva [Collective analysis]. He was a physician, a philosopher and an artist who made of his own life and medical practice the inexhaustible source of his research into human reality. Every event, situation and experience, was an occasion for him to observe, think about and understand that which has always been invisible to the eyes of wakefulness and conscience.

“[…] I’ve never accepted there was no cure for mental illness.”

THE SPRING OF 1945

“[…] And, in the spring of 1945, without realizing it initially, a radical turning point occurred after an accident thousands of people may have. Evidently, I was mature enough to open up to non-conscious reality. A schoolmate of mine hit one of my eyes. I repeat: it was an accident thousands of people may have, but it was crucial for the turning point […]”

“Instead of falling into the void, instead of reacting with annulment, negation, castration, dissociation […]”

“I found a feminine image again. And, although I didn’t realize it, a feminine image must have been the driving force of all that I did afterwards. In fact, I reconciled, attuned, composed my precise mental lucidity which then allowed me to forge my path, from university to my specialty and then to psychiatric research.”

THE STUDIES

On November 25^th, 1957, he gained his degree in Medicine and Surgery and, instead of pursuing a career as a surgeon, he decided to become a psychiatrist, refusing the idea that mental illnesses are incurable.

“There came a man. He lay on the bed; he needed an intravenous injection. The surgeon arrived and said, ‘What’s he doing here?’ ‘He needs an intravenous injection. He’s been dismissed from the asylum and is very ill […].’ ‘Send him back to the asylum!’ How is it that the surgeon treats everybody but this patient must be sent back to the asylum?! No, I don’t like this. Then, I decided I wouldn’t be a surgeon, I’d be a psychiatrist instead! That’s when I decided to become a psychiatrist.”

Lo Scarabocchio [Doodles], 2012 © M.Fagioli

THE YOUNG PSYCHIATRIST

On January 29^th, 1958, he went to Venice to start his first job as a psychiatrist at the psychiatric hospital on the Isle of San Clemente.

“The asylum in Venice was the oldest in Italy; in its splendid, extraordinary library, there were books and patient records dating back hundreds of years […]. And I observed how our dear ancestors, those eminent psychiatrists […], used to dismiss patients with one or two words that were almost always the same. One of these was ‘stolid’; a few more diligent, more intelligent psychiatrists also wrote: ‘Lacking affectivity’.”

However, after only two years, having grown tired of a reality based on an organicist approach to mental illness, he left Venice and, in January 1960, moved to Padua to work at the psychiatric hospital there. He was:

“Looking for thoughts that were interested in comprehending, beyond the anatomy of the human brain, the functioning of the human mind.”

La psichiatria esiste?Una ricerca, un dibattito, un film [Does psychiatry exist? A research, a debate, and a film] 2003 © M.Fagioli

“When I moved to Padua, the hospital’s director was Barison. He was an open-minded liberal, who, as soon as I got there, on January 2^nd, 1960, allowed me to do away with the rules. We abolished all forms of surveillance […]. In Padua, I was in charge of two departments, one was for chronic patients. It was there that I could focus my work on therapy as I immediately started group psychotherapy. I lived with patients, ate with them, went out with them, arranging outings to Venice. The department was surrounded by walls, which I pulled down. I talked to patients, always, endlessly. I had to understand what the point was, where the disease lay, so much so that I often asked, ‘Why are you mad?’ I stayed there for three years, then, I went to Kreuzlingen, in Switzerland, to set up a therapeutic community.”

However, although the Paduan milieu allowed him to adopt a series of psychiatric approaches that were revolutionary and innovative at that time and to write two articles that laid the basis for further research into the etiopathogenesis of mental illness and psychotherapeutic practice, after two years, he decided to leave. And, in January 1963, he went to Kreuzlingen, in Switzerland, to work at Sanatorium Bellevue headed by Dr. Binswanger. There, while working as the director of the therapeutic community, he carried out further research into mental illnesses and psychotherapeutic practice, in particular group psychotherapy. In December 1963, he moved to Rome.

Rome, 1964

“There was the possibility to come to Rome. I called a meeting, there, in Kreuzlingen, ‘I’m leaving, feel free to come if you want to, or stay if you don’t […].’ Nineteen patients came, only an old chronic German lady stayed. So, in 1964, they all came to Rome. We went to live in a lovely three-storey villa […].”

After almost one year, the experience of the therapeutic community came to an end because, once again, Fagioli felt he could not work freely.

“To me, the community obviously meant research; to the other [*], it meant money; so, I carried out individual analysis for 10 years, until 1980.”

*The person with whom he had set up a cooperative-company, Ed.

“[…] I opened a beautiful private practice for individual analysis. I’m not saying that I was doing anything untoward, but, I ended up wearing a suit and tie, with my own practice, which was magnificent, set hours, sessions lasting three quarters of an hour, ten-minute breaks, a secretary, a telephone, appointments, and so forth.”

THE FIRST THREE BOOKS

And these ‘three quarters of an hour’ and ‘ten-minute breaks’ allowed him to give a more structured form to what was then called Human Birth Theory. For instance, on January 15^th, 1972, the first edition of Istinto di Morte e Conoscenza [Death Instinct and Knowledge] was published.

“Now, I see my wandering between Venice, Modena, Padua, Kreuzlingen, and Rome. I think about my continuous elaboration of thought and staying in different towns where I saw the great emptiness beneath the swamps which were only moved by slithering venomous snakes. I wrote Death Instinct and Knowledge. In which, after denouncing ‘The absence of the analyst’, I narrated the story of a patient affected by schizophrenia. It was not only the description of a patient’s symptoms but also the proposition of a psychiatrist who had realized the possibility of curing with a psychotherapy that was based on three pillars: setting, transference and interpretation. Then, there was a second chapter entitled ‘The disappearance fantasy and the death instinct’, and a third, a fourth and a fifth one […]. Maybe, the book’s title should have been: The knowledge of the death instinct, which I had reached by transforming the death instinct – which in human beings is not words – into the annulment pulsion. However, still, I would not have been telling the truth because human life starts with thought which is disappearance fantasy. Thus, I put forward the contradiction between the two terms: ‘fantasy’ which has always referred to images, and ‘disappearance’ which makes one think of ‘inexistence’. I did not change the words, rather, I created a composition that does not refer to something one can perceive but instead speaks of something invisible one can only think of. Then, having given to the word ‘transformation’ its identity by taking it away from the observation of human beings who have fallen into the destructiveness of mental illness, I sustained it with the links of the chain made of the words: ‘Turning that which is into that which is not and, simultaneously, meaning without time, turning that which is not into that which is.’ It is the interhuman relationship without verbal thought that is expressed in words borrowed from consciousness, ‘Hope-certainty that the breast exists.’“

“A few years passed […]. Until I was caught, almost by surprise, by the pains of labour, which would lead to triplets being born, and which lasted almost four years.”

In fact, in November 1974, La marionetta e il burattino was published, and, only a few months later, in January 1975, the so-called ‘third book’, Teoria della nascita e castrazione umana, was published.

“But, I cannot forget it was my entire body that had realized a ‘strange’ practice, that is, a movement of my hand going to the right and then to the left as if the pen were the pendulum of a metronome. There were two piles of white sheets of papers, one on my right-hand side, and the other on my left-hand side, and I would write a few pages now here, now there. They became the two volumes entitled: La marionetta e il burattino and Teoria della nascita e castrazione umana.”

ANALISI COLLETTIVA [Collective Analysis]

It was still in 1975 that something occurred which would make Fagioli’s therapeutic practice and scientific discovery unique. He was invited by the University of Rome Sapienza to carry out the clinical supervision of a group of psychotherapists. A few months later, Fagioli ‘answered’ a request that had never been made before.

“Then, January 13^th, 1976, came. From the back of a crowded small room, there appeared a portion of a woman’s face. ‘I had a dream,’ she said. And she narrated it. There was no longer the silent private practice, there was the Institute of Psychiatry, which was open to everybody. I listened without moving and I cannot remember what I said when I answered. I know that I did not refuse to get involved in a relationship that was new: a free relationship with unknown people. I understood that the method of individual analysis on the couch had disappeared. There appeared a reality of interhuman relationships that had never existed before. Then, many others narrated their dreams and I answered increasingly better compared to the first time when an absolutely new thing had happened: accepting a relationship without rationality that controls behaviour.”

This is how Analisi collettiva started. “A creation by a huge number of people” (Left 2008, L’Asino d’oro edizioni, Rome, 2011, p.180), a reality of cure, education and research that hinged on the interpretation of dreamlike images.

“Is it true that you’ve interpreted more than a hundred thousand dreams?”
“Perhaps even two hundred thousand!”
“Even two hundred thousand dreams.”
“Forty years: four hours, four days a week, sixteen hours a week for forty years.”

Four years after Analisi collettiva had started, in April 1980, a fourth book, Bambino donna e trasformazione dell’uomo, was published.

“It should have been a quick interview, one of the many high points of the summer. Instead, it grew, like a belly, and became a volume.”

“It was the aforementioned fourth book which I wrote four years after I had accepted the challenge by a woman who demanded I not run away but, rather, I answer her and we find together that thought which had always been unknown. Even though the word ‘together’ often transformed its letters into poisoned arrows, I was no longer alone.”

That same year, Analisi collettiva was driven out from University, and in order to avoid it being interrupted, Fagioli found a location suitable to host hundreds of people who took part in that ‘peculiar’ form of group psychotherapy. On November 10^th, 1980, the first seminar took place in Roma libera street, number 23.

Whole volumes would not suffice to describe the thirty-six years that followed. What is certain is that the psychiatrist of Analisi collettiva, with his Theory and endless research into the human mind, made the cure and the realization of hundreds (or even thousands) of people possible. We could say that, since then, Fagioli’s life has been profoundly linked to a story that had never existed before.

“I saw the unimaginable image of Analisi collettiva which was mortal dialectic. I had always felt a strange love for a relationship, which had never existed, between an ‘Indian’ boy and the reality of the human mind, the unconscious, of thousands and thousands of unknown people.”

“Professor, do you still carry out your collective psychoanalysis sessions?”
“Always! It’s been forty years now, four days a week, twenty hours a week for forty years, and the people feel much better, they feel very well. There are cases, very frequent situations, of people who came, maybe fifteen years ago, with a manifest mental illness, with hallucinations. Now, they’ve been healed, they are very well! Why? Because I put forth thoughts about the truth of human beings’ reality which didn’t exist in psychoanalysis, such as the one about human beings’ equality at birth. Because there is the idea that one third of our life is perversion, is perverted unconscious, is madness, the Evil of the Bible, natural evil, evil human nature. It’s not true! It’s not true! One becomes evil.”

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH IMAGES

In all these years, apart from running weekly sessions of group psychotherapy, Fagioli often found himself having to respond to stimuli coming from areas that were apparently distant from the psychiatric field: from architecture to the cinema, from politics to economics (just to mention a few). Fagioli used these stimuli to further expound his continuous research into the reality of the human mind.

“After I’d made some images for the cinema which had evidently been appreciated, a few architects brought me their projects. And I created some sketches for some projects together with them without having any experience. Then, they used their software to add in the technical bits. I came up with the ideas, the drawings, the images! Thus, I built images and drew images. Before Analisi collettiva, I’d never drawn or taken pictures, I wasn’t interested in cameras or drawing. On the contrary, with the story of this unique work where, let’s say, the irrational, fantasy came out, these hundreds and thousands of unknown people, as I don’t even ask their names, asked for an answer, and not so much a rational, technical answer a physician could give, based on Positivism, but rather an answer as realization of an unconscious identity that expresses itself through fantasy”.

The Donna nera [The Dark Woman], 1991, in Il coraggio delle immagini, Florence, 1996

Il palazzetto bianco [the little white palace], designed in 1990 and built in 2005 in S.Fabiano street, Rome

La staccionata [The fence], 1995 © M.Fagioli

FORTY YEARS of ANALISI COLLETTIVA

Over the years, four books became twenty-five.

In 1992, the quarterly journal of psychiatry and psychotherapy, Il Sogno della Farfalla, was first published. The journal was founded by a group of psychiatrists, who have based their clinical activity on Fagioli’s theoretical work and the practice of Analisi Collettiva. Fagioli wrote many significant articles of psychiatry for the journal, including ‘Una depressione’ [‘A depression’], which was first published in 1993, and ‘La psichiatria come psicoterapia’ [‘Psychiatry as psychotherapy’], published in 2013.

From 2002 to 2012 Fagioli held courses of Dynamic Psychology at the University of Chieti Gabriele D’Annunzio; from 2006 to 2017, every week, he wrote the column ‘Trasformazione’ [‘Transformation’] for Left, a weekly political magazine. Both experiences turned into volumes where the ‘Story of a research’ and the Theory were explained, elaborated and expounded.

It is a research that lasted more than forty years through which Fagioli showed how being human is not only possible but a duty. Maybe, forty more years will be needed, however, it is a fact that with this story and this Theory

“New generations will not be like the old ones, that’s for sure!”

“It may happen that some people perceive the message that not all the things that do not start well end badly. That the possibility to be cured exists, is real […]. Possibility to become different, to separate, to transform oneself. Because winter comes along with the constant work, the continuous struggle, the coherence that is important. The lucid mind that cures everybody. Science. The need for science to give a new summer to everyone”.

Biography

Biography

“Do you like life, professor Fagioli?”
“Life? I do! I’m very well indeed!”
“Have you always liked life?”
“Yes, I have, even when there have been difficult times […]”

“[…] I’ve never accepted there was no cure for mental illness.”

THE SPRING OF 1945

“Instead of falling into the void, instead of reacting with annulment, negation, castration, dissociation […]”

THE STUDIES

THE YOUNG PSYCHIATRIST

“Looking for thoughts that were interested in comprehending, beyond the anatomy of the human brain, the functioning of the human mind.”

“To me, the community obviously meant research; to the other [*], it meant money; so, I carried out individual analysis for 10 years, until 1980.”

THE FIRST THREE BOOKS

“A few years passed […]. Until I was caught, almost by surprise, by the pains of labour, which would lead to triplets being born, and which lasted almost four years.”

ANALISI COLLETTIVA [Collective Analysis]

“Is it true that you’ve interpreted more than a hundred thousand dreams?”
“Perhaps even two hundred thousand!”
“Even two hundred thousand dreams.”
“Forty years: four hours, four days a week, sixteen hours a week for forty years.”

“It should have been a quick interview, one of the many high points of the summer. Instead, it grew, like a belly, and became a volume.”

“I saw the unimaginable image of Analisi collettiva which was mortal dialectic. I had always felt a strange love for a relationship, which had never existed, between an ‘Indian’ boy and the reality of the human mind, the unconscious, of thousands and thousands of unknown people.”

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH IMAGES

FORTY YEARS of ANALISI COLLETTIVA

“New generations will not be like the old ones, that’s for sure!”

“Do you like life, professor Fagioli?
Life? I do! I'm very well indeed!
Have you always liked life?
Yes, I have, even when there have been difficult times[...]”

“The egg is not a chick... the foetus is not a child. Then, the new idea that life does not start with warmth but with light reaching the cerebral matter”

“Narrating dreams and asking for their interpretation was an extraordinary phenomenon, which had never happened. And it was a collective and public expression, this is how the seminars of Analisi collettiva started”

“The space being offered by the white sheet of paper, as if it were a naked woman, invites me to write […] narrating the frightening depths touched by the research that wanted to renew articulated language. I wanted to give a name to invisible realities”

“There came a movement from my hand that was not there before. Beforehand, I said, there had been... the requirement, the movement of my mind that wanted to... speak through the images”

Biography

“Do you like life, professor Fagioli?” “Life? I do! I’m very well indeed!” “Have you always liked life?” “Yes, I have, even when there have been difficult times […]”

“[…] I’ve never accepted there was no cure for mental illness.”

THE SPRING OF 1945

“Instead of falling into the void, instead of reacting with annulment, negation, castration, dissociation […]”

THE STUDIES

THE YOUNG PSYCHIATRIST

“Looking for thoughts that were interested in comprehending, beyond the anatomy of the human brain, the functioning of the human mind.”

“To me, the community obviously meant research; to the other [*], it meant money; so, I carried out individual analysis for 10 years, until 1980.”

THE FIRST THREE BOOKS

“A few years passed […]. Until I was caught, almost by surprise, by the pains of labour, which would lead to triplets being born, and which lasted almost four years.”

ANALISI COLLETTIVA [Collective Analysis]

“Is it true that you’ve interpreted more than a hundred thousand dreams?” “Perhaps even two hundred thousand!” “Even two hundred thousand dreams.” “Forty years: four hours, four days a week, sixteen hours a week for forty years.”

“It should have been a quick interview, one of the many high points of the summer. Instead, it grew, like a belly, and became a volume.”

“I saw the unimaginable image of Analisi collettiva which was mortal dialectic. I had always felt a strange love for a relationship, which had never existed, between an ‘Indian’ boy and the reality of the human mind, the unconscious, of thousands and thousands of unknown people.”

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH IMAGES

FORTY YEARS of ANALISI COLLETTIVA

“New generations will not be like the old ones, that’s for sure!”

“Do you like life, professor Fagioli? Life? I do! I'm very well indeed! Have you always liked life? Yes, I have, even when there have been difficult times[...]”

“The egg is not a chick... the foetus is not a child. Then, the new idea that life does not start with warmth but with light reaching the cerebral matter”

“Narrating dreams and asking for their interpretation was an extraordinary phenomenon, which had never happened. And it was a collective and public expression, this is how the seminars of Analisi collettiva started”

“The space being offered by the white sheet of paper, as if it were a naked woman, invites me to write […] narrating the frightening depths touched by the research that wanted to renew articulated language. I wanted to give a name to invisible realities”

“There came a movement from my hand that was not there before. Beforehand, I said, there had been... the requirement, the movement of my mind that wanted to... speak through the images”

“Do you like life, professor Fagioli?”
“Life? I do! I’m very well indeed!”
“Have you always liked life?”
“Yes, I have, even when there have been difficult times […]”

“Is it true that you’ve interpreted more than a hundred thousand dreams?”
“Perhaps even two hundred thousand!”
“Even two hundred thousand dreams.”
“Forty years: four hours, four days a week, sixteen hours a week for forty years.”

“Do you like life, professor Fagioli?
Life? I do! I'm very well indeed!
Have you always liked life?
Yes, I have, even when there have been difficult times[...]”