Psychotherapy and Materialism

The humanization of madness was the emancipatory experience explored by institutional psychotherapy. It developed a collective understanding of medical institutions at the same time as a practice of psychiatry that recognized the patients capacity to play a role in their own and in other patients treatment processes. This book offers a rich contribution to an emerging field. It inscribes this political project in situated social contexts, far from the desert islands of abstract philosophy. Joana Masó, professor of French Studies at the University of Barcelona, and researcher at the UNESCO Chair Women, Development, and Cultures.

Psychotherapy and Materialism reveals François Tosquelles s revolutionary thinking and the practice of institutional psychotherapy as a breakthrough beyond the disciplinary boundaries of medical knowledge. The texts illuminate why political resistance and social practices are fundamental to institutional psychotherapy. Tosquelles conceived of situatedness and complexity as limits of dialectical materialism, offering a framework through which the power of psychiatry s scientific mechanisms can be critically examined. This book uncovers what emerged from the struggle against psychiatric prison systems and explains why non-processual diagnostics are destined to fail. In doing so, it points toward our future, encouraging us to think within a damaged environment that urgently needs healing. Angela Melitopoulos, multimedia artist and researcher, author of De connage (with Maurizio Lazzarato) and Ways of Meaning: Machinic Animism and the Revolutionary Practice of Geo-psychiatry (PhD dissertation, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2016).

A must-read! This volume looks at how François Tosquelles and Jean Oury proposed a revolution in psychiatry. They conceived of the mentally ill being able to move freely inside the hospital as well as outside with family, friends, and neighbours. Tosquelles and Oury advocated that this would actively help therapists to treat people. The two essays in this book are translated from talks given by François Tosquelles in 1947 and Jean Oury in 1970, in which they discussed methods that they tested out at Saint Alban and La Borde respectively. According to Tosquelles, this revolution in psychiatry, conceived in relation to Marxism, involved the creation of both a Club and a hospital committee, as well as the participation of the patients in the kitchen and in numerous workshops. This approach made it possible to practise psychiatry without walls, resulting in reduced medication and shorter stays for patients, as Oury confirms. Anne Querrien, sociologist, member of the editorial board of Chimeres, a journal created by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, following institutional psychotherapy since 1986.

If, as Jean Oury once remarked, it is not so much the Marxist leg and Freudian leg that counts in institutional psychotherapy, but what lies in-between the legs, Psychotherapy and Materialism certainly concerns this space. These foundational texts by Tosquelles and Oury question the myriad ways in which isolation operates: as a medical practice, within scientific methodology, and across disciplines including the segregation of social and mental alienation. Psychiatry is what psychiatrist do, but psychiatrists are not humans standing outside the world, as Tosquelles reminds us in `Psychopathology and Dialectical Materialism . And the continued withdrawal today of the so-called `mad through carceral, psycho-pharmaceutical, discursive, and social measures declares this reminder all the more necessary. Confronting the inertia and dominance of nosology, this volume historically situates a dynamic psychiatric practice, in ways that remain insurgent, traversing the aesthetic, scientific, political, epistemological, and ontological. Perwana Nazif, Art Director at the Los Angeles Review of Books and contributing editor at Parapraxis.

François Tosquelles is a bit like the new kid in the block. On the surface of things, nobody quite knows where he has come from, and yet the rediscovery of his writings alongside a trove of oral anecdotes has catapulted him into the role of being a critical referencepoint in the field of institutional psychotherapy. A staunch Marxist, psychiatrist, and `militant of survival as Félix Guattari described him Tosquelles is a totally crucial figure who embodies the most unorthodox of approaches to madness. In this edited volume, Psychotherapy and Materialism, these two seminal texts the other is Jean Oury s vital take on institutional psychotherapy bear witness to an entirely different history of the post-war period in Europe: one in which the psychiatric hospital becomes a political laboratory. Carles Guerra, curator of Tosquelles: Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field.

Stemming from a conference organized in Berlin in 2019, the edited volume titled Materialism and Politics undertakes a monumental task: mapping out the current discussions in the field of materialism and its relations to politics. I say that this is a monumental task because, as the articles and perspectives gathered in this volume attest, the field of `materialism is impossible to encompass. The effort of the editorial team is thus remarkable. Although they know that a totally exhaustive study on this issue is impossible, they have still managed to put together a collection of essays that provide the reader with a very wide-ranging panorama of the current reflections on the field of materialism. Nicolas Lema Habash, `Book Review: Materialism and Politics' , Thesis Eleven, 2024