By retracing the transnational history of institutional psychotherapy, Camille Robcis explores the political relationship between psychiatric practice and reflection on care institutions during the years 1945-1970. An excellent article by Mickaëlle Provost to read on the La vie des idées website.
In his fascinating book, Disalienation. Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France, Camille Robcis is interested in the French history of institutional psychotherapy, from the 1945s (since its development within the Saint-Alban clinic directed by François Tosquelles) until the 1975s. By networking the figures of François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Jean Oury, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault in order to create a dialogue between texts and perspectives, Camille Robcis seeks to trace the clinical history of a practice – that of institutional psychotherapy where new relationships are established between psychiatry , psychoanalysis, political and care institutions – and the political (intellectual) history of a thought of disalienation. These two stories became intertwined following the war, in the sense that alienation was understood from the double meaning distinguished by Jean Oury, that of “ social alienation ” and D'” psychopathological alienation”, but also in the sense that Marx and Freud were, for Tosquelles, the “ two legs of institutional psychotherapy (one must always follow the other).
A collective and transnational history
Each chapter of the book is devoted to one or two of the five intellectual figures and their relationships are considered from the perspective of belonging to a common problematic space rather than in terms of direct influence. Before being a school or a theoretical point of view, Robcis shows how institutional psychotherapy is a movement of thought inextricably linked to practices, to intellectual friendships, forming a world in which philosophers (Georges Canguilhem), psychoanalysts (Jacques Lacan), clinicians, but also poets (Paul Éluard) or artists (Jean Dubuffet). It’s this “ constellation (p. 13) of practices that Robscis wants to retrace by creating a dialogue between the thoughts of the authors considered, without ever abstracting them from the political contexts and communities (notably the places of care) within which they are embedded. In this sense, Robscis’s investigation undoes the myth of the solitary author to show, on the contrary, the importance of dialogues, echoes, repetitions and that of the conditions (material, collective, affective) thanks to which any practice is developed. of thought. It also opens towards a transnational history of institutional psychotherapy – not Franco-centred – by highlighting the importance of the Catalan experience of François Tosquelles or the psychiatric practice of Frantz Fanon in Algeria and then in Tunisia.(…)
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