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Cet article explore la manière dont les critiques adressées à la psychiatrie ont connu une étape nouvelle suite aux événements de Mai 68. Le but a été d’apprécier dans quelle mesure ce moment devenu si important dans nos représentations s’intègre dans une histoire de la contestation de la psychiatrie dont la chronologie est différente des événements strictement politiques. Ce travail s’appuie sur deux psychiatres, l’Italien Franco Basaglia et le Français Henri Ey, dont les trajectoires et les idées sont divergentes mais qui sont intervenus sur le pouvoir psychiatrique, la médicalisation et la normalisation des comportements c’est-à-dire des thèmes largement discutés au cours de la période qui a suivi les mouvements de contestation de la fin des années 1960. This article examines the way critics regarding psychiatry have evolved following the 68 social unrest. The objective is to appreciate how the psychiatric profession has incorporated this historical moment, so much embedded in our social representations, seen as the time of critical psychiatry but which political chronology differs from the other.This research is based on the work of two psychiatrists, the Italian Franco Basaglia and the French Henri Ey. Their ideas and trajectories diverge, but they both have addressed the issues of medical power, institutionalization and normalization of behaviors in psychiatry ; in other words, the issues that were discussed in the aftermath of the 1968 events.

In the 1960s Franco Basaglia, the Director of a Psychiatric Hospital in a small city on the edge of Italy (Gorizia), began to transform that institution from the inside. He introduced patient meetings and set up a kind of Therapeutic Community. In 1968 he asked two photographers - Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin - to take photos inside Gorizia and other asylums. These images were then used in a photobook called Morire di Classe (To Die Because of your Class) (1969). This article re-examines in detail the content of this celebrated book and its history, and its impact on the struggle to reform and abolish large-scale psychiatric institutions. It also places the book in its social and political context and as a key text of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s.