For a long time, psychoanalysis failed to make inroads into Italy. Idealism, Catholicism and fascism each regarded it as a pseudo-science, while Marxism saw it as a bourgeois ideology. It was only after 1968 that the situation gradually began to change: numerous groups were founded who took their bearings from Lacan, such as the Milan collective Semiotica e psicoanalisi, who organized an international conference on the subject of madness in 1976.