Introduction : a politics of madness -- Francʹois Tosquelles, Saint-Alban and the invention of institutional psychotherapy -- Frantz Fanon, the pathologies of freedom, and the decolonization of institutional psychotherapy -- Felix Guattari, La Borde, and the search for anti-oedipal politics -- Michel Foucault, psychiatry, antipsychiatry, and power -- Epilogue : the hospital as a laboratory of political invention.
Summary:
"From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy Regime's "soft extermination" let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. Yet, in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban and came to be known as "institutional psychotherapy" would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.Though the movement was varied, and the point was never to devise a dogma or a model that could be applied indiscriminately, institutional psychotherapy did attempt to offer an "ethics," or a practice of everyday life. Among its most important principles were the belief that theory and practice were inextricably linked, and that psychiatric practice was explicitly political. Camille Robcis traces the history of institutional psychotherapy from its inception to its various transformations between 1945 and 1975. Each chapter of the book is organized around a thinker who was either at Saint-Alban or who engaged with institutional psychotherapy: from Francʹois Tosquelles, Franz Fanon, Jean Oury and Felix Guattari, to Michel Foucault. They made up a fascinating constellation within which unexpected relationships between characters, contexts, and ideas--often seemingly fragmentary of tangential--emerged"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.