Ed. by Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman

Cultural Inquiry, 31
Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024

Institutional psychotherapy emerged in France during World War II as a resistance movement against the fascist extermination of patients with mental and physical disabilities. The movement was initiated at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital and established a horizontal collective of patients and healthcare workers to dismantle confinement systems reminiscent of colonial and totalitarian practices. Embracing group therapies and patient-run cooperatives, these methods intertwined the ‘treatment of the institution’ and mental ‘disalienation’. The book Psychotherapy and Materialism 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. Inspiring figures like Anne Querrien, Ginette Michaud, and Fernand Deligny, as well as being crucial to Frantz Fanon’s decolonial psychiatry and Félix Guattari’s schizoanalysis, Tosquelles and Oury’s materialist and ‘disalienationist’ approach has led to a radical rethinking of psychoanalysis, education, and social work.
ISBN 978-3-96558-080-0 | Hardcover | 27 EUR
ISBN 978-3-96558-081-7 | Paperback | 10.5 EUR
viii, 134 pp. | 20.3 cm x 12.7 cm

ISBN 978-3-96558-082-4 | PDF | Open Access
ISBN 978-3-96558-083-1 | EPUB | Open Access

Cultural Inquiry, 31
ISSN (Print): 2627-728X
ISSN (Online): 2627-731X

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-31

Posted on 16 December 2024