In recent years the question of colonial psychiatry has received a growing attention; the history of psychiatry and the history of colonialism have intertwined and a new subject has entered the field of historiography: it is the peculiar case of a new otherness – the lunatic in the colonies – bearing a double “difference”, in which an alterity of the “native” at large, is added to a more specific, mental alienity.

In my presentation I’d like to illustrate the establishment of psychiatry in Italy’s former colonies, through its clinical and institutional mechanisms, its underlying theories and the main actors involved, in order to shed some light on the body of knowledge on which this particular form of psychiatry was based, and above all on its organization and implementation within a specifically colonial system of care and committal. I am going to focus my attention on Libya and Horn of Africa, where in the Thirties health care and public assistance – primarily provided for the benefit of Italian immigrants, but subsequently extended to the local population – took on great importance among the colonial administration’s priorities.

My paper will tackle the function and the functioning of the psychiatric insitutions in the colonies, in their relation with the “social policy” of colonial administrations; the process of theoretic and clinical elaboration and its incorporation into the broader colonial project; but also the trajectories of the protagonists: doctors coming form the mother country operating in the colonies; patients – Italian or “indigenous” – suffering from mental disorders in the colonial territories, sent to the mother country asylums before the implementation of a systme of care in loco.

As far as regards the history of the protagonists in the field of psychiatry in the Italian colonies, two analytical approaches were adopted. These were particularly pertinent to the material discovered, namely: the reconstruction of the background and careers of those physicians involved, on the one hand, in order to investigate the cultural-scientific transfers that took place among mothercountry and colonies but also among different colonial situations (for example between Libya and the French Maghreb); and the reconstruction of the histories of the patients, on the other: the physical transfers of psychiatric patients from Addis Ababa, Asmara, Mogadiscio to Neaples asylum and from Libya to Palermo asylum.