He was born in 1924 in Venice. In 1949 he graduated as a doctor and began working as an assistant at the Clinic for Nervous Diseases in Padua. In 1962 he won the competition to direct the Gorizia Psychiatric Hospital. In 1968 he published The Denied Institution. Report of a Psychiatric Hospital, emblematic book where he recounts the experience of Gorizia. In 1971 he wrote together with his wife Franca Ongaro The marginalized majority. The ideology of social control. Basaglia's struggles with the Democratic Psychiatry movement and the Italian left as a whole led to the almost unanimous approval in Parliament of Law 180 on psychiatric reform in 1978, which ordered the progressive closure of psychiatric hospitals promoting community care. .

He passed away in 1980. This book contains the fourteen conferences that Franco Basaglia gave in Brazil in June and November 1979, which today are perhaps the best way to approach his work and explore the ideas, experiences and proposals that have inspired by the Italian psychiatric reform, which in 2008 celebrated its thirty years. It is Basaglia himself who appears, in front of an audience of students, teachers, doctors, psychotherapists and trade unionists. In this way, while he talks about his work, his theoretical elaborations and the first impact of the reform, he displays a complicit and critical relationship with his interlocutors, which allows both his extraordinary communicative capacity to emerge -what makes these texts, among other things, particularly enjoyable- like his way of thinking and acting. Basaglia saw the patient under two aspects. Because of his symptoms, like a sick person. Because of his situation of exclusion and social stigmatization, as the expression of a social symptom. The movement he founded called "Democratic Psychiatry" focused the problem on the abolition of psychiatric institutionalization. Although this proposal spread throughout the world, it gradually limited its objectives to the discharge of the patient and the closure of mental hospitals. The actuality of the field of Mental Health in Argentina makes it necessary to know his experience, especially when he tells us: “The important thing that we have shown is that the impossible has become possible. Ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, it was unthinkable that an asylum could be destroyed. Perhaps the asylums will be closed again, even more closed than before, I don't know, but in any case we have shown that it is possible to assist the crazy person in another way, and testimony is essential. I don't think that the fact that a stock becomes mainstream means that it has expired. The important point is another, is that now we know what can be done”.