Psychotherapy and Materialism
Essays by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury
1st Edition
Published on 11. December 2024
Book
Paperback/Softback
VIII, 134 pages
978-3-96558-081-7 (ISBN)
Description
Institutional psychotherapy emerged in France during World War II as a resistance movement against the fascist extermination of patients with mental and physical disabilities. The movement was initiated at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital and established a horizontal collective of patients and healthcare workers to dismantle confinement systems reminiscent of colonial and totalitarian practices. Embracing group therapies and patient-run cooperatives, these methods intertwined the 'treatment of the institution' and mental 'disalienation'. The book Psychotherapy and Materialism offers the first English translation of two seminal texts by institutional psychotherapy co-inventors François Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist and anarcho-syndicalist, and Jean Oury, founder of the La Borde clinic. Inspiring figures like Anne Querrien, Ginette Michaud, and Fernand Deligny, as well as being crucial to Frantz Fanon's decolonial psychiatry and Félix Guattari's schizoanalysis, Tosquelle and Oury's materialist and 'disalienationist' approach has led to a radical rethinking of psychoanalysis, education, and social work.
Reviews / Votes
The humanization of madness was the emancipatory experience explored by institutional psychotherapy. It developed a collective understanding of medical institutions at the same time as a practice of psychiatry that recognized the patients' capacity to play a role in their own and in other patients' treatment processes. This book offers a rich contribution to an emerging field. It inscribes this political project in situated social contexts, far from the desert islands of abstract philosophy. - Joana Masó, professor of French Studies at the University of Barcelona, and researcher at the UNESCO Chair Women, Development, and Cultures.More details
Persons
Editor
Marlon Miguel is Co-Principal Investigator of the project 'Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe' at the Media Faculty of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and a Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin. He holds a double PhD in Fine Arts and Philosophy. His current research proposes to critically inquire into the notion of 'disorder' and to de-essentialize it, looking at the use of artistic media in critical psychiatric practices such as those of François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Fernand Deligny, and Nise da Silveira.
Elena Vogman is a media theorist, Principal Investigator of the research project 'Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe' at the Media Faculty of Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and a Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin. Her research focuses on critical psychiatry, and feminist and postcolonial theory with an emphasis on film and media. She has published work in October, Grey Room, and e-flux and is the author of two books: Sinnliches Denken. Eisensteins exzentrische Methode (Diaphanes, 2018) and Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein's Capital Project (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
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Content
- 'Disalienation of the Total Fact of Madness': An Introduction / Marlon Miguel, Elena Vogman
- Note to the Reader on 'Psychopathology and Dialectical Materialism' / Sophie Lesage
- Psychopathology and Dialectical Materialism / François Tosquelles
- Institutional Psychotherapy: From Saint-Alban to La Borde / Jean Oury