Maria José Palma Borrego

Spanish fascist psychiatry Maria José Palma Borrego

In Spain, after the constitution of psychiatry as a discipline and its subsequent development, clearly with the changes brought about by republican psychiatry, a kind of syncretism between racial theory, coming from Germany and the Spanish cultural tradition, and the fundamentalist Catholicism of the Regime was established in psychiatric discourse during the Civil War and Franco's regime. This will be characterised, on the one hand, by theoretical poverty, considering the mentally ill mainly as political prisoners instead of psychiatric patients as such, and, on the other hand, by the consideration, in clinical practice, of the mentally ill as sinners, who were to be treated more from the perspective of Catholic morality and charity than from the theoretical presuppositions of the psychiatric clinic itself.