Autism and institutionalization. A report from a research on the archive of Venice’s ex asylum in the island of St. Servolo

In a recent book, by Gil Eyal and colleagues, The Autism Matrix, the deinstitutionalization of mental retardation in the sixties is seen as the auroral moment of its emergence. While we were working on autism, we posed ourselves the same questions. Where does the discourse about “autism” come from? What was autism before being “autism”, that is, before its naming by Kanner and Asperger? We also had the perception that the absence of “autism” in the public discourse during the previous decades, had something to do with the institutionalization as a psychiatric problem of what now stays under the name of autism. Therefore, we started a research on the clinical files of the archive of the ex-asylum of Venice, on the island of St. Servolo, to verify that assumption. This research was published in 2013 with the title A sé e agli altri: Storia della manicomializzazione dell’autismo e delle altre disabilità relazionali nelle cartelle cliniche di S. Servolo, To him/her/itself and to others: History of the institutionalization of Autism and other relational disabilities from the clinical files of St. Servolo. Looking in front of you at St. Marco’s square, from Palazzo Ducale, you can see a small island surrounded by a high wall of bricks: that is St. Servolo’s island, and from the end of 18th century until 1980 it was Venice asylum. After Basaglia’s law in Italy, a museum of the asylum and an archive has been created there.