In 1905, Giulio Cesare Ferrari, an Italian child psychiatrist of undisputed fame, published an article in Rivista di Psicologia, on children and sexual traumas focussing on the case of a girl, Enrichetta, who was raped at the age of eight.
Ferrari reported that, soon after the sexual abuse, Enrichetta’s family noticed a drastic change in the child’s behaviour: she sought the company of boys, engaged in “indecent acts”, exhibited herself naked on her balcony, stole money from her parents to buy alcohol for herself and gifts for her boyfriends. Not knowing how to handle the situation, the girl’s parents referred her for psychiatric treatment. The Italian internment law, Law n. 36 of 1904, clearly stated that internment was necessary when public scandal was involved, and surely prompted Enrichetta’s family to seek psychiatric help.
Ferrari observed that the girl came from a family with genetic predisposition to nervous anomalies. At a time when Lombroso’s theories dominated, degeneration, both mental and moral, was thought to be of a genetic nature and inherited, therefore family history was always at the basis of every patient’s assessment. However, the psychiatrist also noted that Enrichetta had “very vivid imagination, normal degree of attention, rich production of ideas, quick and original associations, good and detailed memory”. She loved both studying and playing, could read and write, and had kept an exemplary conduct since the first day of internment. Crucially, during the initial observation period, 15 days by law, which could be extended to a maximum of 30, she had shown no interest in anything of a sexual nature, which was judged as reassuring because for a woman to do so was thought to be “against nature” and pathologized, as much as precocious sexual desire both in girls and boys was read as an unmistakable sign of “moral madness”. On the down side, Enrichetta took no interest in “female” occupations, something that the psychiatrist duly underlined as it was thought to be unnatural for a girl not to enjoy embroidery, cookery, home-cleaning, or not to show any maternal instinct. In addition, he observed that his young patient manifested worrying signs of vanity as she indulged in combing her long and wavy blond hair. The pending diagnosis was that of “moral and intellectual deficiency”.
Surprising as it might seem to the contemporary reader of the article, at the end of the observation period, Ferrari confirmed the need for Enrichetta to be interned because he believed that the trauma could have awakened memories on how sex was explained and described to the girl in her social environment. Enrichetta was the daughter of two factory workers and the implication here is that the lower classes, at the centre of social concerns from the second half of the eighteenth century across Europe, talked about sex in obscene, vulgar and violent terms. Could these attitudes be genetically inherited by their children? Ferrari’s conclusions indicate that he firmly believed so: urban working-class people produced degenerate children, he implied, and these children had distorted and immoral ideas about sex too, as they bore inborn dormant seeds of degeneracy. In other words, by birth these boys and girls were potential degenerates, criminals, prostitutes, fraudsters and alcoholics. Furthermore, as many sexual anomalies stemmed out of traumas, “we must fear that in her [Enrichetta] lie the germs of a perverted or excessive sexuality, and these will gradually ripen and come in the open later, when a chance presents itself”.
Within the Lombrosian theoretical context that at time dominated psychiatric theory in Italy, Ferrari’s decision is not so surprising. In his view, Enrichetta’s sexually promiscuous and rebellious behaviour, her vanity and first signs of erotomania were thought to be already present before she was abused. They were simply triggered by rape and could grow into social danger, scandal and immoral behaviour, according to Ferrari. Her social background firmly positioned her in the category of those who had a predisposition for degeneration. Internment therefore was considered an apt and justified preventative measure. Needless to add, the idea of an inborn “stain”, present in every human being and calling for constant repentance and repression is closely connected with the Catholic concept of the original sin. The starting point of every life, in Catholic dogma, is that of an innocently inherited flaw. In fascist times, this idea was greatly developed in sexology too. As theoreticians started arguing that all individuals were born bisexual and then “naturally” developed into heterosexuals, correctly repressing their latent inborn homosexuality, the concept of a genetic predisposition to sexual inversion of every human being started to alarm the scientific community and the general public alike. As everyone carried vice and immorality – true enemies within –, the regime's medical professionals called for an urgent and tougher repressive moralisation campaign aimed at facilitating the “correct” evolutionary process and to induce self-repression, if for some reason nature had failed.
The idea that dormant immorality could be awaken and passed on, from the perpetrator of a violent act, rape or abuse, to his genetically predisposed victim, reappears in the mental health hospitals archives I consulted for the Gerda-Henkel-funded project “Too Much Love” I am currently working on. The project focusses on the pathologisation of emotions, affection and love in Southern Italy during the fascist regime. As I am investigating the psychiatric hospitals archives in the region of Puglia, I came across other cases where young victims of abuse were interned.