“A Glimpse of Inner Struggles”: Psychiatry and Human Identity in the Work of Silvano Arieti

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze some relevant features of the reflection on human identity carried out by the famous Italian psychiatrist Silvano Arieti, who in 1939 migrated to the United States in order to escape Fascist racial laws. Based on an archival research on Silvano Arieti’s Papers held by the Library of Congress, this paper combines a biographical approach with a scientific analysis of Arieti’s works. The article starts from his researches on schizophrenia ( Interpretation of Schizophrenia, 1955 and 1974), which he considered a gateway to wider reflections on the human condition, and then retraces in some of his subsequent writings ( The Intrapsychic Self, 1967, and The Will To Be Human, 1972) the development of a philosophical and scientific inquiry into a “core of man” described as burdened with dichotomies and contradictions.