Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France

by Camille Robcis

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. But in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the local 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 came to be known as institutional psychotherapy and would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.

In Disalienation , Camille Robcis grapples with the historical, intellectual, and psychiatric meaning of the ethics articulated at Saint-Alban by exploring the movement’s key thinkers, including François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Anchored in the history of one hospital, Robcis's study draws on a wide geographic context—revolutionary Spain, occupied France, colonial Algeria, and beyond—and charts the movement's place within a broad political-economic landscape, from fascism to Stalinism to postwar capitalism.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, History, Philosophy, Psychiatry, Psychology

232 pages, Paperback

Published May 3, 2021

Reviews

[0 · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a chapter each on Tosquelles, Fanon, Oury/Guattari, and Foucault, Robcis demonstrates how the development of "French theory"--from psychoanalysis and phenomenology to post-structuralism--was mutually intertwined with the institutional psychotherapy movement following WWII, and the rise of the anti-psychiatry movement after 1968. Exceedingly fun, concise, easy and informative to read. I learned about Fanon's and Foucault's early mutual interests in establishing mental and social analyses of psychiatric etiology. Lacan, Canguilhelm, and Merleau-Ponty appear throughout, in the background :)

[Durakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a highly readable account of Institutional Psychotherapy and its networks centered in France. Although one ought not rest on this book's often terse analyses of such complicated texts as Anti-Oedipus or History of Madness, Robcis does a great job following their receptions and influences on the intellectual scene and institutional practice and activism. Specific chapters circle around the thesis that figures like Fanon and Foucault's divergent itineraries were in part influenced by their encounter with institutional psychotherapy and the problems it raised for them. The Tosquelles and Foucault chapters were especially illuminating for me. Reading this will give you a much better understanding of Foucault's position re: antipsychiatry for instance. A good read if you're into "French theory" and its many tendrils but even more so if you are interested in the relations between theory and psychiatric practice.

[Julius Kopald]

Largely historical but the chapter on Guattari sheds much theoretical light.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb piece of scholarship.

"...the story that I trace here also seeks to reframe the intellectual history of a strain of what has come to be known as 'French theory,' not only by explaining the influence of psychiatry in its development, but also by showing the deep political and affective commitments that infused and shaped it. The prism of psychiatry allows us to depart from the usual treatment of these postwar thinkers within a structuralist/poststructuralist divide or by reference to the reception of phenomenology and existentialism in France. Many of the thinkers in this study were conversant in these philosophical traditions, but constructing this particular constellation around institutional psychotherapy can bring to light other seemingly disparate ideas, places, and people.

"This is especially the case with Fanon, whose conspicuous absence in the genealogy of institutional psychotherapy is significant...."

[vr reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Potted biographies of 4 figures involved in transforming francophone psychiatry. As the epilogue says:

" my point is to show how Fanon, Guattari, Tosquelles, Oury, Foucault, and others partake of a shared history more complex and more relevant than the scholarship that incessantly divides “French” and “Francophone” thinkers from each other. "

Some interesting context content if you're deep into the thinkers (I could appreciate the Guattari ephemera but not the Foucault, and even the Guattari chapter seemed like it missed some big parts) but overall I felt like this book didn't live up to its billing / stated purpose in the intro/outro. Thankfully it didn't take long to read.

If you do anything.... look up the Tosquelles model boat photo(s). Pure gold.