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E-book
Author Robcis, Camille, author

Title Disalienation : politics, philosophy, and radical psychiatry in postwar France / Camille Robcis
Published Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 220 pages) : illustrations
Series Chicago studies in practices of meaning
Chicago studies in practices of meaning.
Contents Introduction : a politics of madness -- François Tosquelles, Saint-Alban and the invention of institutional psychotherapy -- Frantz Fanon, the pathologies of freedom, and the decolonization of institutional psychotherapy -- Félix Guattari, La Borde, and the search for anti-oedipal politics -- Michel Foucault, psychiatry, antipsychiatry, and power -- Epilogue : the hospital as a laboratory of political invention
Summary "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. Yet, in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the 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 and came to be known as "institutional psychotherapy" would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.Though the movement was varied, and the point was never to devise a dogma or a model that could be applied indiscriminately, institutional psychotherapy did attempt to offer an "ethics," or a practice of everyday life. Among its most important principles were the belief that theory and practice were inextricably linked, and that psychiatric practice was explicitly political. Camille Robcis traces the history of institutional psychotherapy from its inception to its various transformations between 1945 and 1975. Each chapter of the book is organized around a thinker who was either at Saint-Alban or who engaged with institutional psychotherapy: from François Tosquelles, Franz Fanon, Jean Oury and Félix Guattari, to Michel Foucault. They made up a fascinating constellation within which unexpected relationships between characters, contexts, and ideas--often seemingly fragmentary of tangential--emerged"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Psychotherapy -- France -- History -- 20th century
Psychiatry -- Political aspects -- France
Psychiatry -- Philosophy -- History -- 20th century
HISTORY -- General.
Intellectual life
Psychiatry -- Philosophy
Psychiatry -- Political aspects
Psychotherapy
SUBJECT France -- Intellectual life -- 20th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85051442
Subject France
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780226777887
022677788X