Psychotherapy and Materialism

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, Tosquelle and Oury’s materialist and ‘disalienationist’ approach has led to a radical rethinking of psychoanalysis, education, and social work.