Il fisico e il morale. Andrea Verga e la psichiatria italiana nel XIX secolo

Andrea Verga (1811–1895) epitomizes the problems, hypotheses, theories, and questions that shaped nineteenth-century Italian psychiatry. A pivotal figure in the institutionalization of the discipline—hailed by his contemporaries as the “father of Italian psychiatry”—Verga has, nevertheless, received little historiographical attention. This neglect is symptomatic of the broader fate of early Italian alienism as a whole. This study draws on both Verga’s published works and the extensive, heterogeneous documentation preserved in his private archive to explore several foundational issues raised at the origins of psychiatric thought and its nineteenth-century transformations. Particular attention is devoted to the relationship between the physical and the moral, a theme that occupied a central place in Verga’s reflections and that situates him within cultural contexts such as the French vitalism of the Montpellier school, the circle of the Idéologues, and the first generation of French alienists. Building on the theoretical and epistemological debates of that medico-philosophical milieu—ranging from the primacy of sensibility over other faculties (intellect and will) in constituting consciousness, to the role of passions in the etiopathogenesis of mental alienation and their historical variability—Verga developed a conception of the individual and of mental illness that resists reduction to the dominant nineteenth-century frameworks of psychiatric knowledge. In his view, the human being, whether healthy or ill, possessed a decentered interiority, diffused throughout the body and capable, through sensibility, of producing a form of pre-intellectual consciousness. Character, habits, and affections—the very constitution of the self—took shape, and could be altered, independently of the intellect, and above all through constant interaction with the surrounding environment. From this standpoint, Verga’s understanding of mental illness necessarily encompassed the subject’s history and lived experience, conceived as an organism in continuous material and affective exchange with the external world. His work as a whole thus reflects a latent tension: on the one hand, a holistic conception of the suffering subject; on the other, the relentless search for a cerebral locus of mental illness—a search that would define psychiatry in the latter half of the century under the influence of degeneration theory, positivism, and psychiatric organicism more broadly. These issues are investigated through an analysis of several key concepts, their epistemological significance, and their implications for knowledge of the physical and moral dimensions of the human being as well as for psychiatric theory. The first chapter examines sensibility, emphasizing its central role in Verga’s thought and connecting it to the French traditions of vitalism and the Idéologues. The second chapter addresses the theme of lucid madness, with particular focus on monomania: a nosographic category emblematic of early French alienism, which starkly illustrates the interplay between conceptions of the physical–moral relationship and psychiatric practice. The third chapter turns to moral insanity, arguably the most influential category of lucid madness—both in the nineteenth century and in contemporary debates. The final chapter reexamines the physical–moral nexus through Verga’s clinical notes and case records. His gaze upon the patient, his therapeutic strategies, and his recourse to older medico-philosophical traditions such as the non-naturals, broaden the understanding of his polycentric and relational conception of subjectivity. This approach highlights the entanglement of psychiatric knowledge with broader theories of the mind–body relationship.