Rita Levi-Montalcini: the neurologist who challenged fascism.

Rita Levi-Montalcini was a researcher in the field of neuroscience, Italian and Jewish in origin, who discovered the nerve growth factor and rightfully earned the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside her collaborator Stanley Cohen. She was persecuted by the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini and experienced gender and religious discrimination throughout her entire life. Despite these obstacles, she carried out her activities with diligence and grace, becoming a role model in the field. This paper reviews the life and career of Rita Levi-Montalcini.

Rita Levi-Montalcini foi uma pesquisadora no campo das neurociências, de origem Italiana e Judia, que descobriu o fator de crescimento neural e merecidamente recebeu o Prêmio Nobel de Fisiologia ou Medicina de 1986, em conjunto ao seu colaborador Stanley Cohen. Ela foi perseguida pela ditadura fascista de Benito Mussolini, e sofreu discriminação de gênero e religião durante sua vida inteira. A despeito desses obstáculos, sempre exerceu suas atividades com diligência e graça, tornando-se um exemplo nesse campo de estudo. O presente artigo faz uma revisão sobre a vida e carreira de Rita Levi-Montalcini.

"Down with fascism, up with science": Activist psychologists in the U.S., 1932-1941.

At the height of the Depression, more psychologists in the U.S. were awarded degrees than could find jobs. Master's level graduates were particularly affected, holding positions that were tenuous, and they rejected second-class membership offered by the American Psychological Association. In response to this employment crisis, two Columbia University MA graduates created The Psychological Exchange, a journal that offered graduates and established colleagues a forum for news, job ads, and for discussing the expansion of psychology to address problems of the Depression. This article describes the Exchange and its unique window into psychologists debating how to reshape their field. In 1934, it was used by young Marxists to launch The Psychologists' League, which agitated for colleagues who lost their jobs, tried to make research socially relevant, and connected with movements for the "social reconstruction" of society. It raised the consciousness of its members and sympathizers by linking to worldwide antifascist struggles while fighting antisemitism and nativism at home. While previous accounts make the League seem a spontaneous eruption, this article shows how members of the Communist Party created it, then controlled its agenda and activities. During the Stalin-Hitler pact they followed Stalin's anti-war ideology and the League became a shell organization. Its members, nonetheless, creatively mixed psychological concepts and political ideology, drawing in colleagues through discussion groups, demonstrations, and social events. Sources for this work include unpublished correspondence, a diary, and Federal Bureau of Investigation files that reveal more complex lives than previously portrayed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Rise of Italian Fascism: A Cross-City Quantitative and Historical Text Qualitative Analysis.

Evidence linking past experiences of worsening health with support for radical political views has generated concerns about the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The influenza pandemic that began in 1918 had a devastating health impact: 4.1 million Italians contracted influenza and about 500 000 died. We tested the hypothesis that deaths from the 1918 influenza pandemic contributed to the rise of Fascism in Italy. To provide a "thicker" interpretation of these patterns, we applied historical text mining to the newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia (Mussolini's newspaper). Our observations were consistent with evidence from other contexts that worsening mortality rates can fuel radical politics. Unequal impacts of pandemics may contribute to political polarization. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(2):242-247. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306574).

Repressive Moralism: World Making and Petty Fascism in Transgender Politics.

The past decade has seen a shift in the way that minorities exert their influence in society. Where in previous decades the emphasis was on winning the hearts and minds of the population at large, a recent strategy has been to ignore general public discourse and only to target specific influential bodies. In this paper we use the example of transgender issues to analyse the socio-psychological dimensions of this approach. We show how some groups promoting these issues eschew a wider social discourse and debate in the mass media, and how their strategy rests on a self-construction as victims of the hetero-normative society, with a concomitant appeal to moral rather than factual argumentation. This is combined with a programme of aggressive challenge to opponents through social media, and sometimes direct action, which effectively closes discussion on the topic. We conclude that these methods have much in common with the oppressive politics of fascist rule.

A puzzling marriage? UNESCO and the Madrid Festival of Science (1955).

From 17 to 22 October 1955, Madrid hosted the UNESCO Festival of Science. In the early years of the Cold War, in a dictatorial country that had recently been admitted into the international community, the festival aimed to spread science to the public through displays of scientific instruments, public lectures, book exhibitions, science writers professional associations, and debates about the use of different media. In this context, foreign visitors, many of whom came from liberal democracies, seemed comfortable in the capital of a country ruled by a dictatorship that had survived after the defeat of fascism in the Second World War and was struggling to gain foreign recognition after years of isolation.This article analyzes the political role of science popularization in Madrid at that time. It approaches the apparently puzzling marriage between UNESCO's international agenda for peace and democracy and the interests of the Francoist elites. Shared views of technocratic modernity, the fight against communism, and a diplomacy that served Spanish nationalism, paved the way for the alliance.

Medical Education for What?: Neoliberal Fascism Versus Social Justice.

In her 2018 book, What the Eyes Don't See, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha wrote that it is the duty of doctors to speak out against injustice. In fact, no other physician or institution in Flint had done the research and spoken out, as a whistleblower, against the poisoning of Flint's children by Michigan government. Why had Dr. Hannah-Attisha? Unfortunately, in the absence of a medical education system that teaches community-oriented primary health care in the tradition of the 1978 Alma Ata Declaration, there is little reward in doing so. This article focuses on three movements that are challenging medical education orthodoxy: 1) primary health care 2) the medical humanities and 3) "Study Up your Town" medicine. How can we create a radical health pedagogy - one that draws the links between several pandemics raging across the planet: capitalist collapse, climate disruption, Covid-19, racism, and an emergent neoliberal fascism - to enable doctors, health professionals and citizens to see them as all of one piece? Medical educators must employ critical pedagogy to create legions of "constructive troublemakers" who challenge the social-structural obstacles that are driving millions to premature death. We have reached the "end times." A new "planet medicine" is finally emerging.

'Psychosis of civilization': a colonial-situated diagnosis.

In the late 1930s, when colonial psychiatry was well established in the Maghreb, the diagnosis 'psychosis of civilization' appeared in some psychiatrists' writings. Through the clinical case of a Libyan woman treated by the Italian psychiatrist Angelo Bravi in Tripoli, this article explores its emergence and its specificity in a differential approach, and highlights its main characteristics. The term applied to subjects poised between two worlds: incapable of becoming 'like' Europeans - a goal to which they seem to aspire - but too far from their 'ancestral habits' to revert for a quiet life. The visits of these subjects to colonial psychiatric institutions, provided valuable new material for psychiatrists: to see how colonization impacted inner life and to raise awareness of the long-term socio-political dangers.

Optimizing and normalizing the population through hormone therapies in Italian science, c.1926-1950.

This essay explores how hormone treatments were used to optimize and normalize individuals under Italian Fascism. It does so by taking the activities of the Biotypological Orthogenetic Institute - an Italian eugenics and endocrinological centre founded by Nicola Pende in 1926 - as the prime example of a version of eugenics, biotypology, which was based on hormone therapies. This essay first demonstrates that Italian Fascist biopolitics was not only concerned with increasing the size of the Italian population, but also with improving its quality. It suggests that under the Italian Fascist regime hormone therapies became eugenic tools of intervention to improve the Italian race. Second, while Pende's institute purportedly enhanced men and women, its activities show the extent to which the 'techniques of normalization' pursued by the Fascist regime were both systematic and invasive.

The "Authoritarian Personality" Reconsidered: the Phantom of "Left Fascism".

This article explores the question of "Left fascism," which emerged in relation to discussions around the Student Movement in the German Federal Republic in the crucial decade between 1967-1977. The term was originally coined by Jürgen Habermas in a lecture entitled "The Phantom Revolution and its Children" in which he suggests that the extreme voluntarism of the students could not but be characterized as "Left fascist." Such a characterization becomes the basis for a vitally important exchange of letters between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno from January to August of 1969 on the relation between theory and praxis. After first sketching Adorno's conception of the "authoritarian personality," with the help of Sándor Ferenczi's concept of the "identification with the aggressor," the article proceeds to examine the exchange of the letters between Adorno and Marcuse, illustrating Adorno's changed orientation: that "fascism" or "authoritarianism" maybe either left or right. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the authoritarian tendencies of the contemporary Left.

[Public health in Franco's Spain as seen from the World Health Organization: the Brockington Report (1967)]. / La sanidad franquista vista desde la Organización Mundial de la Salud: el Informe Brockington (1967).

The aim of this note is to introduce the report on the health system of Spain written in 1967 by the WHO expert on Public Health Administration, and retired professor of the University of Manchester, Prof. CF Brockington, I summarise along general lines the relationships established between Spain and the WHO, describe the role of consultants, give an outline of the character of this author and the political context of the time. I also describe the difficulties encountered with his recommendations, which can nevertheless be viewed as seminal contributions to the major changes that were to take place during the Spanish Democratic Transition. The full text of the Report, in Spanish, can be accessed in the online Appendix of this article.

Political terrorism and affective polarization in "black" and "red" terrorists in Italy during the years 1968-1988.

Psychiatric evaluations of violent political crime were mostly performed on a case-by-case basis in a forensic environment, which made them unduly dependent on categories of presumed dangerousness and legal responsibility, rather than on a clinical definition of their mental status. In referring to such "clinical" definitions, the disorder we have in mind is not limited to the major, agitated psychotic manias or mixed states. The presence of a dominant temperament, or protracted hypomania, is enough by itself to explain an individual's engagement in a wide range of activities, not necessarily sociopathic or violent. We put forward the hypothesis that formal and transpolitical radical choices, either in favor of an illegal lifestyle or of activities involving a high level of risk, may be linked with certain mental states, especially when considering small clandestine groups showing a high level of internal ideological consensus, and a no-return attitude toward a commitment to radical choices. Available data about the psycho(patho)logical profile of terrorists are still hard to come by. The only available studies are those on identified living terrorists (judging by the trials of those who personally admitted to having been terrorists), and statistical data imply a number of documented cases belonging to the same terrorist organization. In Italy, the period often called the "years of lead [bullets]" displays an interesting viewpoint for the study of terrorist psychology, for two main reasons: first of all, it is a historically defined period (1968-1988), and second, the number of ascertained participants in terrorist activities was quite large.

The beginning of Francoist psychiatry: the National Neurology and Psychiatry Conference (Barcelona, 1942).

While there has been some research into Francoist psychiatry, much work still needs to be done on the reorganization of the mental health profession within the new state. Held in Barcelona on 12, 13 and 14th January 1942, the National Neurology and Psychiatry Conference undoubtedly played a major role in the attempt to overthrow the dominant ideas in the field of Spanish psychiatry and displace its most influential figures. This article seeks to analyse the Conference's main organizational features and examine its most significant content, with the aim of evaluating its strategic importance in the context of both the psychiatrists' professional and scientific interests and their ideological and political concerns. Conference papers tackled issues such as neurology and psychiatry in wartime, vitamin deficiency and the nervous system, and new psychiatric treatments, including shock therapy. The Conference's marked ideological nature represented the beginning of a new professional dynamic, featuring the emergence or establishment of new leaders intent on laying the foundations of psychiatry during the early years of the Franco regime.

Christian psychopathology: psychiatry and knowledge for the sake of salvation in the early years of Francoism.

After World War II came to an end, General Franco's regime attempted to step aside from the defeated fascist states by emphasizing its Catholic character. The change of image culminated in 1947 with the establishment of Spain as a Catholic State by means of the Law of Succession. This process generated the national catholic ideology, which became, during the first decades of the dictatorship, the hegemonic instrument for the transformation of Spanish society in an anti-modernizing way. Scientific activity was not excluded from these changes, and a Catholic science conveying universal values and in harmony with the faith was strongly encouraged. One example of this Catholic science was the psychiatric approach developed by Juan José López Ibor during the first Francoist period, including the concepts of anagogy, the perfection instinct, psychagogy and, above all, anxious thymopathy and life anguish. This paper analyses the Christian background of these notions, their scientific repercussions and their social utility for the dictatorship. This paper emphasizes the consideration of these key notions of Spanish psychiatry during the First Francoism as knowledge of salvation, i.e., as conveyors of assumed eternal values in accordance with the prevailing view of Catholicism. On the other hand, it points to the functioning of these concepts as a part of the regulatory network designed and deployed by Francoism to promote submission and resignation in the Spanish population.

Mental hygiene in early Francoism: from racial hygiene to the prevention of mental illness (1939-1960).

In this paper, we study the ideological bases of mental hygiene, understood as racial and moral hygiene, during the first years of Franco's regime and their evolution until 1960. First, we discuss the conceptualization of mental hygiene in the 1940s and its role as a tool for the legitimization of dictatorship, revealing the involvement of orthodox Catholicism and its links with moral and racial hygiene. Second, we assess the transformation of mental hygiene during the 1950s towards modernization and a stronger linkage with the dominant trends of contemporary psychiatry without ever leaving the ideological background of Catholicism. For this purpose, we will focus on analysis of the activities of the Mental Hygiene Week held in Barcelona in 1954 and on the creation in 1955 of the National Board of Psychiatric Care, which took on mental hygiene as one of its functions. This paper shows the close relationship of mental hygiene during the early years of Francoism with the political principles of the Dictatorship. The 1940s witnessed the deployment of a harsh discourse in which mental hygiene was a tool for the (moral and spiritual) education of the Spanish people in the political principles of the "New State", pathologizing political dissent and ideologically purifying the country. In the 1950s, Francoist mental hygiene underwent a process of aggiornamento marked by international political events following the defeat of fascism in World War II, advancing a project for (authoritarian) modernization in an international context already directed towards mental health.