Psychotherapy and Materialism

Beschreibung

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.

Autor*in

Marlon Miguel
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.

Themen in »Psychotherapy and Materialism«

institutional psychotherapy dialectical materialism Tosquelles, François Oury, Jean cooperatives mental illness - treatment psychiatric hospital care anti-psychiatry

Stimmen zu »Psychotherapy and Materialism«

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.
()

Psychotherapy and Materialism reveals François Tosquelles’s revolutionary thinking and the practice of institutional psychotherapy as a breakthrough beyond the disciplinary boundaries of medical knowledge. The texts illuminate why political resistance and social practices are fundamental to institutional psychotherapy. Tosquelles conceived of situatedness and complexity as limits of dialectical materialism, offering a framework through which the power of psychiatry’s scientific mechanisms can be critically examined. This book uncovers what emerged from the struggle against psychiatric prison systems and explains why non-processual diagnostics are destined to fail. In doing so, it points toward our future, encouraging us to think within a damaged environment that urgently needs healing. — Angela Melitopoulos, multimedia artist and researcher, author of Déconnage (with Maurizio Lazzarato) and Ways of Meaning: Machinic Animism and the Revolutionary Practice of Geo-psychiatry (PhD dissertation, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2016).
()

A must-read! This volume looks at how François Tosquelles and Jean Oury proposed a revolution in psychiatry. They conceived of the mentally ill being able to move freely inside the hospital as well as outside with family, friends, and neighbours. Tosquelles and Oury advocated that this would actively help therapists to treat people. The two essays in this book are translated from talks given by François Tosquelles in 1947 and Jean Oury in 1970, in which they discussed methods that they tested out at Saint Alban and La Borde respectively. According to Tosquelles, this revolution in psychiatry, conceived in relation to Marxism, involved the creation of both a Club and a hospital committee, as well as the participation of the patients in the kitchen and in numerous workshops. This approach made it possible to practise psychiatry without walls, resulting in reduced medication and shorter stays for patients, as Oury confirms. — Anne Querrien, sociologist, member of the editorial board of Chimeres, a journal created by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, following institutional psychotherapy since 1986.
()

If, as Jean Oury once remarked, it is not so much the Marxist leg and Freudian leg that counts in institutional psychotherapy, but what lies in-between the legs, Psychotherapy and Materialism certainly concerns this space. These foundational texts by Tosquelles and Oury question the myriad ways in which isolation operates: as a medical practice, within scientific methodology, and across disciplines — including the segregation of social and mental alienation. Psychiatry is what psychiatrist do, but psychiatrists are not humans standing outside the world, as Tosquelles reminds us in ‘Psychopathology and Dialectical Materialism’. And the continued withdrawal today of the so-called ‘mad’ through carceral, psycho-pharmaceutical, discursive, and social measures declares this reminder all the more necessary. Confronting the inertia and dominance of nosology, this volume historically situates a dynamic psychiatric practice, in ways that remain insurgent, traversing the aesthetic, scientific, political, epistemological, and ontological. — Perwana Nazif, Art Director at the Los Angeles Review of Books and contributing editor at Parapraxis.
()

The practices (and contradictions) described in Psychotherapy and Materialism give us some insight into how to support the self-governance of ‘surplus’ communities, how to attend to both ‘tedium’ and contradiction in the formation of non-carceral approaches to care, how to work through tensions between the anarchist impulse to abolish institutional hierarchy and the Marxist commitment to the collective analysis of social contradiction, and how to join in enunciative forms of solidarity with the protagonists of our historical moment. — Janna Graham, ‘“The patient’s concrete society is itself the sick individual”: Review of Psychotherapy and Materialism, Part 2’, e-flux, 22 October 2025 < https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783410/the-patient-s-concrete-society-is-itself-the-sick-individual-review-of-psychotherapy-and-materialism-part-2>
()

Details

Link teilen