Psychotherapy and Materialism: Tosquelles, Oury, and Radical Psychiatry

How can care and cure practices counter the homogenizing policies of institutions? Can the work of healing go beyond the neoliberal economy of individual well-being? This evening will explore the legacies of institutional psychotherapy, a movement of psychiatric reform and resistance that emerged in postwar France in response to the fascist extermination of patients with mental and physical disabilities. Initiated at Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital by a collective of Marxist psychiatrists, activists, philosophers, and nuns from the Saint-Régis community, Jewish refugees and surrealist artists, the movement embraced group therapies and patient-run cooperatives.

The publication of (ICI Berlin Press, 2024) edited by Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman, 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. Navigating dialectical materialism, Tosquelles critically dismantles the stasis of biological and nosological categories in psychiatry in favor of a relational science anchored in social praxis. Oury highlights the principles developed by institutional psychotherapy, from the creation of spaces inside the hospital that allow for the ‘freedom of circulation’ to the transversality of care and its connection to other social and pedagogical movements. Tosquelles’ and Oury’s ‘disalienationist’ approach was further developed in Frantz Fanon’s decolonial psychiatry and Félix Guattari’s schizoanalysis. It led to a radical rethinking of psychoanalysis, education, and social work promoted by figures like Gisela Pankow, Anne Querrien, and Ginette Michaud.

The panelists will discuss the published texts alongside legacies of institutional psychotherapy today, involving contemporary experiences from psychoanalysis and mental healthcare at Fountain House and The Greene Clinic.

Elena Vogman is a writer, media theorist and Principal Investigator of the research project “Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe” at Bauhaus University Weimar.

Perwana Nazif is the Art Director at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a contributing editor at Parapraxis. She is currently organizing a solo exhibition of François Pain's video essays on institutional psychotherapy at JOAN in Los Angeles.

Christopher Landry a community psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in practice in New York City. He is the Associate Medical Director at Fountain House, a therapeutic community for people living with serious mental illness, and a co-founder of the Greene Clinic’s Constellation Program, which adapts the methods of institutional psychotherapy to contemporaryoutpatient practice.

Host or Publisher The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis