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I, Little Asylum
Founded in 1951 and renowned in the world of psychiatry, the nonstandard clinic of La Borde sought to break with the traditional internment of the mentally ill, and to have them participate in the material organi- zation of collective life. The clinic owed much to psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari who was co-director until 1992.
When you live at La Borde as a child whose parents work in the clinic, the place feels mostly like an incredible space of freedom: a castle, an immense park, forests and ponds. Through a series of vignettes painted in impressionistic strokes, Emmanuelle Guattari tenderly evokes the whimsical days of a childhood spent in that extraordinary place.
When you live at La Borde as a child whose parents work in the clinic, the place feels mostly like an incredible space of freedom: a castle, an immense park, forests and ponds. Through a series of vignettes painted in impressionistic strokes, Emmanuelle Guattari tenderly evokes the whimsical days of a childhood spent in that extraordinary place.
87 pages, Paperback
First published August 22, 2012
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July 25, 2016
I have been eyeing this book at my bookstore for about four months now, and yesterday, I made a commitment to it - in other words, I bought it. Right now, due to a project that I'm working on, I'm interested in childhood memoirs, and this is technically a work of fiction, I think it's more of a memoir then anything else. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it very much. About a little girl who was raised with her family in a mental hospital, where the parents worked. It has a child's eye view of the world or landscape, and it is often touching, yet profound in parts. And of course, it's very European orientated - and touches on the horror show that was World War 2. A nice little Semotext(e) press release.
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October 12, 2021Alright. This one begins with the dad. No dad no book. Least not this book.
Deleuze & Guattari. Lots of excitement. Intellectual excitement. Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze thinks / thinks thinking / thinksthinking. Guattari helps sick people. And writes. This book was written by his daughter / Emmanuele.
At the back of the book we are informed that –
She / or an editor or agent / chose to call the book a novel. It might more firmly have been thought as memoir / as recollections / something of that sort. Perhaps it is more popular nowadays – in France? / elsewhere? – to note that anything remembered and written down has undergone at least a little novelization. Mathieu Lindon’s Learning What Love Means would be another example of this / and although it probably doesn’t matter / from the same publisher.
I, Little Asylum appeared in France in 2012 with the title La petite Borde / or The Little Border / a title with less definition / much less self / and perhaps most importantly much less intrigue than the English edition’s title. If anything / the English title is more French than the French one. Can’t imagine it as a title of Freud’s or Horney’s or Irigaray’s – this identification of the self with its own emotional-mental difficulties / uniquenesses.
The cover black-and-white photograph of the author-as-child with her back to us and looking toward the imposing mansion-like asylum building / and the frontispiece photo of her facing us with the building in the background – both present the asylum as a large locus of white in an otherwise dark landscape. Emmanuelle herself refers to the white clot of the Castle. On the cover – wearing shoes / her slender white legs / a pair of shorts and a white blouse / her left hand slightly obscured from us by her clothing / the right perhaps holding something that we cannot see / her hair drawn tight at the back / and of her face only a sliver of left jaw accessible to view. Perhaps she is seven or eight. The frontispiece photo shows her much closer to us / facing us / the building much larger behind her / and with an expression on her little face that is completely impossible to read. It seems to be saying at least several things / and saying them perhaps only to herself. They do not seem to be being shared / they are at most permitted to us. Perhaps her father studied the matters that he did / thought the thoughts that he formed and which formed him / and did the things he wanted or had to do / in order to one day be able to untangle the gestalt of his young daughter’s face.
Shadows and clothing tell us that the photos were taken on the same day and close to the same time. In neither photo is there any other human being / unless we ourselves bring the photographer into the picture. They are not credited.
The book’s contents are divided into two sections / the first with nine and the second with thirteen brief bits with short titles. Sixteen of the titles begin with the word the / giving a rather jejune overtone to the undertaking.
ASYLUM
The La Borde Clinic was in Blois / a couple hundred kilometers SSW of Paris on the Loire. The clinic was founded in 1953 by the psychiatrist Jean Oury / and her father joined it within a couple of years.
We can infer from how she speaks of it below that the experience of living there was largely agreeable.
A phalanstery is a large building designed for communal living / based on the ideas of Charles Fourier. We might want to have another look at Roland Barthes’ Sade, Fourier, Loyola in which he speaks appreciatively about Fourier’s ideas and intentions.
She speaks of the building’s inhabitants variously as Residents / Patients / or Madmen. She writes that –
The children did have what she calls human exchanges with the patients. They were free to do so / although there were some patients that they’d been warned to stay away from. They had been asked to not disturb the patients / in particular to not scream. For some reason / and she doesn’t provide it / a children usually talked with a patient when they were alone. For a while the childcare center was part of the main building. And eventually, the children took on a more embarrassed attitude toward the Residents.
Emmanuelle writes of somebody they called the Tench / because she liked to swim. A tench is a fish from the minnow family but that can grow to fifteen pounds. She gets her own chapter fairly early in the book. The narrator / the novelist / never tells us who the Tench is. We’re left to wonder. She is described using a form of writing in which many of the sentences begin with the word She.
And more. Hard not to wonder if Emmanuelle has read Joe Brainard’s terrific and
memorable books – I Remember / I Remember More / More I Remember More. In them each line begins with I remember… / and there are lots and lots of lines.
CHILDHOOD
She writes of her life among other children – We moved about like a host of sparrows, gathered in a brazen and loquacious constellation. They snuck into the dining room and asked the cook / her uncle / for something to eat. They went for walks in the asylum’s grounds. One day they came upon the pits where the institution’s shit was accumulated / walking around the edges and talking / until somebody fell in. Her family had a pet monkey which her father had brought back from Africa / but it seems primarily he who wanted to have anything to do with it. The children went fishing / had chestnut fights / sat in derelict vehicles in the car cemetery / played pranks on the switchboard operator. She spent time with a farming family / the father of which took her for rides in a big basket he carried – she seems to have liked being there and to have felt safe. Her own family had an automobile accident – everybody survived.
In the next to last section she tells us about the three Enguerrand brothers who lived nearby. She develops a warm friendship with the youngest.
Life was being good to her / this young child of perhaps nine.
[ If I don’t stop writing this book report will soon be as long as the book. Maybe I really do think too much / as more than one ex-friend has said. ]
BROTHERS
The first chapter of the book is about her brothers / one of whom seems to have been older / the other younger. It tells of a squabble / a brother convincing her to jump into the water / and off a motorcycle / some of it set during a walk through the woods. That brother insists on being the one in charge. Walking through water she steps into a hole. Her brother rescues her with an “Oh, my poor little Manou!”
A brother throws shoes at her to keep her awake and listening. She hated the lemon yogurt that came in the multi-packs. A brother found a drawer under the table into which he emptied her inedible yogurt. And they disposed of the powdered milk hot chocolate that she couldn’t stomach. The brothers were / at least for the most part / kind to her / and they survive in her memory as such.
MOTHER
Emmanuelle’s mother has remained dear to her.
She tells a lovely quickening story about the family drifting down a river in a small boat. Suddenly / the mother says that she left the stove on under the pot of water. They rush to get to the shore and thence home. The mother is distraught / the children worried. We never learn what did or didn’t happen to the family house.
Her mother was born before the war and affected by its shortages and terrors. She tells a story about going with others to gather acorns to make ersatz coffee / something which it was not permitted to do / getting caught by a large German man who empties out the acorns and sends them home with the basket. My mother’s memories of the Occupation never dulled. Emmanuelle remembers a collection of books about the atrocities of the camps. She thinks her mother bought them. She read one about Mengele’s experiments on French women prisoners of war. There is a recurring presence of war in the background of her book – not only her mother’s memories / but also those of her grandfather from WW I / and the stories one of hears aunts told.
Quite in passing she mentions their stepmother / but never says what age she was when the stepmother arrived. It seems certainly to have been when she was still a child. Resentment of the stepmother is instanced during a lunch at which she served meat. The children are looking at their servings with mistrust. She tells them to eat. “Your meat smells like shit,” my brother suddenly intones like some baritone. He was removed from the table by his collar.
FATHER
There are few details about her father / mostly words that pass in the telling of other stories. His most extended appearance occurs not in the quotidian of her childhood but in a dream she had. It’s raining / she’s running toward the castle / she makes it to the kitchen entrance / there’s someone there / maybe it’s one of the residents / she’s afraid of getting hit / it’s her father / he pulls her aside / she says “But Daddy. What are you doing here?” / he says he’s come there incognito / “But Daddy. You’re dead.” / Then another pff!, and he marches off into an opaque curtain of rain; I see a section of his back drawing away.
We’re left wondering what her psychoanalyst father would have made of that.
The father is something of a specter / at least in his daughter’s book. Others have said that he was depressed / sometimes hyper / a loner / very quiet. Who knows? Emmanuelle knows / but she isn’t exactly telling us. She isn’t making that part of her life clear. Perhaps it is not clear to her.
The only non-dream father story is about her getting caught shoplifting at the nearest department store. The manager phones her father.
*
I, who am speaking to you are words that occur in the midst of a story. With them she binds herself / the writer / to herself / the child Emmanuelle. And she binds them both to us.
The delight of the book exists largely in the lyrical moments of childhood which Emmanuelle describes as such / as lyrical. There’s a beautiful section that begins with an automobile accident and ends with a fly drowned in the milk her brother has refused to drink. The last section is about seeing a young stag on the way to school. The description is economical and at the same time flushed with whimsy. She has preserved for us some of the ways things really do happen in childhood / and that is a simple gift simply given.
/ copyright © 2021 Alan Davies
Deleuze & Guattari. Lots of excitement. Intellectual excitement. Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze thinks / thinks thinking / thinksthinking. Guattari helps sick people. And writes. This book was written by his daughter / Emmanuele.
At the back of the book we are informed that –
Emmanuelle Guattari was born in 1964. She grew up at the La Borde psychiatric clinic (at Cour-Cheverny, in the Loir-et-Cher, France) where her parents worked for their entire lives. She has taught French and English in the United States and in France. She now devotes herself to writing. She has three children and lives in Paris. I, Little Asylum is her first novel.
She / or an editor or agent / chose to call the book a novel. It might more firmly have been thought as memoir / as recollections / something of that sort. Perhaps it is more popular nowadays – in France? / elsewhere? – to note that anything remembered and written down has undergone at least a little novelization. Mathieu Lindon’s Learning What Love Means would be another example of this / and although it probably doesn’t matter / from the same publisher.
I, Little Asylum appeared in France in 2012 with the title La petite Borde / or The Little Border / a title with less definition / much less self / and perhaps most importantly much less intrigue than the English edition’s title. If anything / the English title is more French than the French one. Can’t imagine it as a title of Freud’s or Horney’s or Irigaray’s – this identification of the self with its own emotional-mental difficulties / uniquenesses.
The cover black-and-white photograph of the author-as-child with her back to us and looking toward the imposing mansion-like asylum building / and the frontispiece photo of her facing us with the building in the background – both present the asylum as a large locus of white in an otherwise dark landscape. Emmanuelle herself refers to the white clot of the Castle. On the cover – wearing shoes / her slender white legs / a pair of shorts and a white blouse / her left hand slightly obscured from us by her clothing / the right perhaps holding something that we cannot see / her hair drawn tight at the back / and of her face only a sliver of left jaw accessible to view. Perhaps she is seven or eight. The frontispiece photo shows her much closer to us / facing us / the building much larger behind her / and with an expression on her little face that is completely impossible to read. It seems to be saying at least several things / and saying them perhaps only to herself. They do not seem to be being shared / they are at most permitted to us. Perhaps her father studied the matters that he did / thought the thoughts that he formed and which formed him / and did the things he wanted or had to do / in order to one day be able to untangle the gestalt of his young daughter’s face.
Shadows and clothing tell us that the photos were taken on the same day and close to the same time. In neither photo is there any other human being / unless we ourselves bring the photographer into the picture. They are not credited.
The book’s contents are divided into two sections / the first with nine and the second with thirteen brief bits with short titles. Sixteen of the titles begin with the word the / giving a rather jejune overtone to the undertaking.
ASYLUM
The La Borde Clinic was in Blois / a couple hundred kilometers SSW of Paris on the Loire. The clinic was founded in 1953 by the psychiatrist Jean Oury / and her father joined it within a couple of years.
We can infer from how she speaks of it below that the experience of living there was largely agreeable.
In the vibrant and wholesome universe of the Labordian phalanstery into which we’d been born, I’d never been able to take full stock of the situation.
We knew, of course, that the residents were Madmen. But La Borde was, first and foremost, our home.
A phalanstery is a large building designed for communal living / based on the ideas of Charles Fourier. We might want to have another look at Roland Barthes’ Sade, Fourier, Loyola in which he speaks appreciatively about Fourier’s ideas and intentions.
She speaks of the building’s inhabitants variously as Residents / Patients / or Madmen. She writes that –
We were not particularly aware of the Residents, whom we also called Patients. They were simply there, and we were there too. … We felt affection toward some of them, and some of them liked us very much. But above all, in the eyes of the children that we were, they were grown-ups. And as such, they were bearers of a certain authority and were stronger; that was the chief difference between us and them.
The children did have what she calls human exchanges with the patients. They were free to do so / although there were some patients that they’d been warned to stay away from. They had been asked to not disturb the patients / in particular to not scream. For some reason / and she doesn’t provide it / a children usually talked with a patient when they were alone. For a while the childcare center was part of the main building. And eventually, the children took on a more embarrassed attitude toward the Residents.
Emmanuelle writes of somebody they called the Tench / because she liked to swim. A tench is a fish from the minnow family but that can grow to fifteen pounds. She gets her own chapter fairly early in the book. The narrator / the novelist / never tells us who the Tench is. We’re left to wonder. She is described using a form of writing in which many of the sentences begin with the word She.
She had little square hands, very small, like those of a child.
She had Greek feet.
She had yellow skin and black hair. She told us that once upon a time, a rich young Arab man who was infatuated with her had asked her to marry him. She’d hesitated, but hadn’t wanted to leave with him in the end.
She was very thin. She was flat chested.
She always bought fresh cream and butter, just in case. Because of the war.
She bought fresh milk, every day, just as you’d buy a newspaper.
And more. Hard not to wonder if Emmanuelle has read Joe Brainard’s terrific and
memorable books – I Remember / I Remember More / More I Remember More. In them each line begins with I remember… / and there are lots and lots of lines.
CHILDHOOD
She writes of her life among other children – We moved about like a host of sparrows, gathered in a brazen and loquacious constellation. They snuck into the dining room and asked the cook / her uncle / for something to eat. They went for walks in the asylum’s grounds. One day they came upon the pits where the institution’s shit was accumulated / walking around the edges and talking / until somebody fell in. Her family had a pet monkey which her father had brought back from Africa / but it seems primarily he who wanted to have anything to do with it. The children went fishing / had chestnut fights / sat in derelict vehicles in the car cemetery / played pranks on the switchboard operator. She spent time with a farming family / the father of which took her for rides in a big basket he carried – she seems to have liked being there and to have felt safe. Her own family had an automobile accident – everybody survived.
In the next to last section she tells us about the three Enguerrand brothers who lived nearby. She develops a warm friendship with the youngest.
The middle one was the prettiest. The middle one was the mascot of the Blois girls. He was delicate and graceful, and the way he presented himself as a boy was quiet and introverted. He had a delicious dimple that made Isabelle go crazy.
Yet, the one I liked the most was the youngest one. He was my age, though that wasn’t why I liked him.
He said ‘chat’ instead of ‘talk’; we ‘chatted’ a lot together.
We had things in common.
I learned that beyond the big forest, there was a Castle with Madmen and that some children lived there too.
At first he’d come over for no reason, after school, taking the shortcut through the woods on his bicycle to get to my house; he’d be terribly red when he arrived. He’d stand in front of the white fence, unsaddled, hip tipped off his bike. I’d come out with a glass of water. We were incapable of exchanging a single word. He would drink, and leave.
One day, my mother got angry:
“At your age, love doesn’t exist.”
We’d known La Borde’s car cemetery.
Life was being good to her / this young child of perhaps nine.
[ If I don’t stop writing this book report will soon be as long as the book. Maybe I really do think too much / as more than one ex-friend has said. ]
BROTHERS
The first chapter of the book is about her brothers / one of whom seems to have been older / the other younger. It tells of a squabble / a brother convincing her to jump into the water / and off a motorcycle / some of it set during a walk through the woods. That brother insists on being the one in charge. Walking through water she steps into a hole. Her brother rescues her with an “Oh, my poor little Manou!”
A brother throws shoes at her to keep her awake and listening. She hated the lemon yogurt that came in the multi-packs. A brother found a drawer under the table into which he emptied her inedible yogurt. And they disposed of the powdered milk hot chocolate that she couldn’t stomach. The brothers were / at least for the most part / kind to her / and they survive in her memory as such.
MOTHER
Emmanuelle’s mother has remained dear to her.
My mother has vanished from my life like a soap bubble that bursts. …
How can it be? She was here. She isn’t anymore. Where is she? …
I go and sit in a café, knowing she will come and sit opposite me.
I’m certain that she will come. …
I’m ready to make a deal with life: take ten years from me for a fifteen-minute conversation with her.
Take my eighties, take my seventies, Hell, take my sixties.
Give me back what you took! Give me a tiny instant of everything you robbed me of! …
Please, I beg you! I’d look at her one last time.
She tells a lovely quickening story about the family drifting down a river in a small boat. Suddenly / the mother says that she left the stove on under the pot of water. They rush to get to the shore and thence home. The mother is distraught / the children worried. We never learn what did or didn’t happen to the family house.
Her mother was born before the war and affected by its shortages and terrors. She tells a story about going with others to gather acorns to make ersatz coffee / something which it was not permitted to do / getting caught by a large German man who empties out the acorns and sends them home with the basket. My mother’s memories of the Occupation never dulled. Emmanuelle remembers a collection of books about the atrocities of the camps. She thinks her mother bought them. She read one about Mengele’s experiments on French women prisoners of war. There is a recurring presence of war in the background of her book – not only her mother’s memories / but also those of her grandfather from WW I / and the stories one of hears aunts told.
Quite in passing she mentions their stepmother / but never says what age she was when the stepmother arrived. It seems certainly to have been when she was still a child. Resentment of the stepmother is instanced during a lunch at which she served meat. The children are looking at their servings with mistrust. She tells them to eat. “Your meat smells like shit,” my brother suddenly intones like some baritone. He was removed from the table by his collar.
FATHER
There are few details about her father / mostly words that pass in the telling of other stories. His most extended appearance occurs not in the quotidian of her childhood but in a dream she had. It’s raining / she’s running toward the castle / she makes it to the kitchen entrance / there’s someone there / maybe it’s one of the residents / she’s afraid of getting hit / it’s her father / he pulls her aside / she says “But Daddy. What are you doing here?” / he says he’s come there incognito / “But Daddy. You’re dead.” / Then another pff!, and he marches off into an opaque curtain of rain; I see a section of his back drawing away.
We’re left wondering what her psychoanalyst father would have made of that.
The father is something of a specter / at least in his daughter’s book. Others have said that he was depressed / sometimes hyper / a loner / very quiet. Who knows? Emmanuelle knows / but she isn’t exactly telling us. She isn’t making that part of her life clear. Perhaps it is not clear to her.
The only non-dream father story is about her getting caught shoplifting at the nearest department store. The manager phones her father.
“I’m coming,” is all he says, but without anger.
I wait for a while.
He arrives. He says:
“How much do I owe you?”
We leave.
We’re in the car. He tells me:
“Here’s that little pendant, take it.”
And adds:
“You’re not going to hang yourself, are you?”
*
I, who am speaking to you are words that occur in the midst of a story. With them she binds herself / the writer / to herself / the child Emmanuelle. And she binds them both to us.
The delight of the book exists largely in the lyrical moments of childhood which Emmanuelle describes as such / as lyrical. There’s a beautiful section that begins with an automobile accident and ends with a fly drowned in the milk her brother has refused to drink. The last section is about seeing a young stag on the way to school. The description is economical and at the same time flushed with whimsy. She has preserved for us some of the ways things really do happen in childhood / and that is a simple gift simply given.
/ copyright © 2021 Alan Davies
January 14, 2015
"I was ten and I remember reading, with great concentration, the volume on the details of Mengele's experiments, the one on the French female prisoners f war at Ravensbrück, and the one on Auschwitz.
I seem to remember that my mother had bought the volumes from a door-to-door salesman who sold collections of books around the countryside where we lived; we'd also gotten from him a complete and rather unsophisticated leather-bound collection of Zola, whose volumes were so heavy they made my wrists buckle.
They left me with aches that never faded."
I seem to remember that my mother had bought the volumes from a door-to-door salesman who sold collections of books around the countryside where we lived; we'd also gotten from him a complete and rather unsophisticated leather-bound collection of Zola, whose volumes were so heavy they made my wrists buckle.
They left me with aches that never faded."
July 5, 2019
i left my finished copy of this book at hallesches haus in berlin, go snag it if yr lucky and it hasn't already been picked up by a curious stranger ;)
July 5, 2021
fairly amateurish prose which is fine and maybe even predictable but it made me very jealous that my dad isn’t Guattari (or Lacan, for that matter) instead of an accountant
November 15, 2022
delicate childhood vignettes of growing up at La Borde clinic. I get the urge to not replicate her father’s convoluted writing but girl give us something?
July 22, 2025
no because she is the same age as my dad???
February 15, 2021
In a way this book, or rather, this collection of childhood fragments feels a bit awkward. But then again, I kind of like that? It is not what you expect and we all seem to crave for more anecdotes about the patients at La Borde, and more juicy inside-knowledge about the writer's dad, Felix Guattari.
(For anyone looking for that, rather try Intersecting Lives, the joint biography of Deleuze and Guattari written by Francois Dosse!)
If anything, to read this book is a good reminder to acknowledge what we too often expect from families (let's not forget the ''nuclear family'' concept from AO) or how we expect the ''children of [famous people]'' to perform.
(For anyone looking for that, rather try Intersecting Lives, the joint biography of Deleuze and Guattari written by Francois Dosse!)
If anything, to read this book is a good reminder to acknowledge what we too often expect from families (let's not forget the ''nuclear family'' concept from AO) or how we expect the ''children of [famous people]'' to perform.
September 16, 2020
I probably went into this with the wrong expectations. Written by the daughter of an intellectual hero of mine, Felix Guattari, I expected this to recount the experience of being raised in La Borde, the mental hospital that Guattari worked in that shaped a lot of his ideas. Instead this book is a series of dream-like childhood vignettes, centred more around experiences of eating and food than interactions with the hospital. It's wonderfully written and charming in its own right but not what I was after.
May 11, 2017
Not particularly revealing wrt life at La Borde but very sweet as a memoir
March 4, 2018
dreamlike recollection of a childhood worth writing about
September 16, 2024
Dismay in parallel
June 7, 2025
The best title ever??
Anyway, this is Felix Guattari's daughter and she grew up in an asylum. It's quite slight and vignette-y, but it was interesting.
Anyway, this is Felix Guattari's daughter and she grew up in an asylum. It's quite slight and vignette-y, but it was interesting.
August 1, 2017
kendi tımarhanelerimiz ötesinde anlatılabilecek kaç hikâye kaldı. Ağustos ayının kavurucu anlarını aşıp bize ulaşan ormandaki o yavru geyik hikâyesi, bahçedeki ağacın ölümüne yol açan süt tozu... vesaire... La Borde'da dolaşırken arada sırada gözleriniz kamaşacak, ötesi değil... hafif bir serinliğin aklımızı başımızdan alması.
January 13, 2015
Intéressant ce regard ludique sur la clinique du paternel. Par contre, Folio aurait pu se forcer un peu pour la page couverture, franchement, c'est quoi cette photo? La couverture de la traduction anglaise est tellement mieux...
April 6, 2014
very charming
April 1, 2015
Such a disappointment
July 22, 2015
I'm glad so many memories of childhood are focused around food.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews