Camille Robcis, "Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody. Welcome to New Books in Psychoanalysis. This is JJ Mull. I will be your host for today. And I'm very pleased to be joined by Camille Robesies, who, just by brief way of introduction, Camille currently teaches at Columbia University.

Prior to coming to Columbia, she taught at Cornell for 10 years. She has received fellowships from the Penn Humanities Forum, Princeton Law and Public Affairs, the Society for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Her area of scholarly expertise is modern European intellectual history, with a focus on 19th and 20th century France. More broadly, her interests have circled around three issues: the historical constructions of norms, the intellectual production of knowledge, and the articulation of universalism and difference in French modern history.

She is the author of The Law of Kinship, Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France, published by Cornell University Press, and most recently of Disalienation, Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Post-War France, which came out from the University of Chicago Press just within the last month or so, just recently came out.

And that is the book that we will be discussing today, Disalienation. And I just have to say it's real pleasure to have you on, Camille. And the book is totally fascinating. So thanks for taking the time. Thank you, JJ, for inviting me. Of course.

So generally on the program, I like to just give folks a kind of opportunity, just in sort of a broad strokes way, to give people a sense of how this book came to be. You know, how did this project come about personally, intellectually, politically? What are kind of the origin stories of this particular project? Great. So I first started

heard about institutional psychotherapy, which I think we'll talk about in a little bit more detail. I first heard about it when I was researching my first book that you mentioned, The Law of Kinship. And that book looked at how

how and why French judges and legislators had turned to anthropology and psychoanalysis, and especially to these very difficult texts by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan to reassert the centrality of the heterosexual family in debates that concerned bioethics, same-sex unions, things like surrogacy, reproductive technologies,

And in that book, I was interested in the ways in which Lévi-Strauss and Lacan had formulated what I called a social contract, a structuralist social contract in which sexual difference was key.

So as I was working on that book, one of the chapters in that book dealt with the philosophical critiques of the structuralist social contract in the 1970s and on French feminists like Lucie Rigaret and also on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari whose book "Anti-Oedipus" was, as its title says, very much a critique of the Oedipal structure.

So, so when I was researching, when I was writing the book, I started to read more about anti-Oedipus and I came across the name of François Tusquelles, who was, if we could, we could say one of the kind of founding fathers of institutional psychotherapy. And also Jean-Houry, who directed the Clinique Laborde where Guattari worked for most of his life.

So I didn't actually realize this until recently, but in some ways, my two books were sort of connected in the sense that the first book was really about, I mean, both were about psychoanalysis, but the first book was about the kind of more conservative uses of psychoanalysis and the second book about its more liberatory potential politically. But in some ways, the two sides of the same coin.

Maybe just sort of just kind of as briefly as possible, as you said, we'll probably get into this a little deeper as we go. But just for listeners, maybe just give maybe a brief distillation of institutional racism.

institutional psychiatry institutional therapy as a movement um and then we'll kind of get into the weeds a little little later yeah so so that's a kind of hard question because um there's not a single definition of institutional psychotherapy is not it was not so much of a doctrine or a theory but really i think the best way to think of it is as a practice as a practice as a as a kind of as an ethics that needed to constantly be rethought and evolve right with with

with the kind of clinical practice that needed to adapt. So we could say in very simple terms that institutional psychotherapy was a psychiatric practice that was born in France during the Second World War.

A lot of it was in response to the massive death toll that was occurring in psychiatric institutions during the war, during the Second World War. So we've all heard about the Nazi forced euthanasia of those that the Nazi regime deemed incurably sick, right? But in fact, the Vichy regime in France also allowed

40,000 patients to die in psychiatric hospitals. This is what some historians have called a soft extermination. So they weren't actually killed, but they were kind of led to die of cold, starvation, lack of care, etc.,

And so the war really convinced this first generation of institutional psychotherapists that psychiatry was fundamentally political, that it was affected by politics, but that it needed to speak to politics. But more generally, I think we could also say that that institutional psychotherapy, that the idea behind institutional psychotherapy was that that we all need institutions in our lives. Right. We need them socially. We need them psychically. So we need there's families, political unions,

parties, schools, hospitals also. So those were important. But the problem with institutions is that they always had the potential to become alienating, to produce new forms of alienation. And here alienation is really understood, I think, in its French version, French meaning alienation, which means both the kind of psychic state of being mad, insane, but also a social condition that makes people feel estranged, trapped, or isolated from others.

So the challenge of institutional psychotherapy was to kind of rethink institutions with the help of social theory, especially, and psychoanalysis. So a lot of Marx, a lot of Freud, just guys called Marx and Freud the two legs of institutional psychotherapy. So can you rethink institutions so that they wouldn't become authoritarian, hierarchical, oppressive, stagnant, et cetera?

So I think Jean-Henri described it, I forget the exact terms, but he described institutional psychotherapy as the kind of the work of systematically tracking down concentrationisms, authoritarianisms, right? Psychiatry is a form of systematic critique. So that's, I think, a way, I mean, this is a little abstract, but I think we'll get into the details later of how this was worked out on a practical basis. But that's the kind of main idea behind institutional psychotherapy. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. And I think, I mean, just as you were speaking, I think you touched on a lot of the themes that I was hoping to get into, which I think it's, you know, as I'm listening and as I was reading the text, I think one of the things that was really striking to me was the extent to which there really is

a kind of blurring of the boundaries in some ways between what one would ordinarily think of as the purely theoretical and the practical or praxis. And then praxis also, you know,

praxis in the dual sense of both meaning sort of both a kind of political intervention and also praxis at the level of psychiatric or therapeutic intervention. And so I think, and this is maybe a bit of an extension of the first question, but I think, you know, in what ways do you think that these thinkers and practitioners rework or reformulate ideas and arguments about

the fundamentally political nature of the psyche and then alternatively, the kind of critical importance of taking into account

unconscious processes when thinking about politics. Once it's a little broad, but yeah. No, that's a great question. I think to answer them, I'm going to kind of grounded it in an example. Because I think it's, again, important to return to the context here of the birth of institutional psychotherapy and especially the role that fascism played in the emergence of institutional psychotherapy.

So just some background, institutional psychotherapy was born in a small town in central France called Saint-Alban. And it's really the war that brought together the cast of characters who eventually developed this practice, this theory and practice. So I mentioned the figure of Francois d'Eusquelles, who was very important for Guattari and for Deleuze.

So, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so,

So you could say that for Tuskegee's politics was kind of really in his blood, right? He fought the fascist army, the Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War. And then when the Republicans lost, he fled to France, as many Spanish refugees did. And he was placed in a camp, in a concentration camp for Spanish refugees.

And what's interesting about this case is that basically, so he fights at the front and then he's in the camp and he's trying to figure out how he can be most helpful. And he sets up a psychiatric service to treat the combatants and to help the refugees who had obviously been very much affected psychically from the war.

So for him, I think this kind of his life was the best evidence that politics and psychiatry were intimately linked, right? Not only was the war producing these kind of specific psychic symptoms, and there's all these psychic symptoms that come up during that are basically that emerged during the war. But more generally, you could say,

fascism, authoritarianism, collaboration, all of those political regimes require a particular state of mind, right? You can't look back at

the kind of huge fascist rallies in Germany or in Italy or in Spain, for that matter, without, you know, thinking about the centrality of libidinal processes when you see the kind of screaming crowds, right, the role of fantasy, the role of identification with a leader, the role of desire. So this was kind of very present for all of them, all of the first generation, but

but for Tuskegas too. And so when Tuskegas gets to France, he arrives, I think it's in '39 or something like that, and he basically encounters another form of occupation, if you'd like, which is that, or another form of concentrationism, which is the German occupation of France and the Vichy regime.

So Saint-Alban is basically under, is in the Vichy, is under the Vichy supervision, which is also fascistic. And the first goal of the hospital is really to survive the war, to feed its patients so they don't die like all the other patients in hospitals.

And the other doctors that are present at Saint-Albert are also deeply politicized. Most of them come from kind of communist, anarchist backgrounds. We can mention here, for example, Lucien Bonafé, who was a psychiatrist who had worked in Toulouse for a long time. He was in the resistance, and he fought in the resistance and brought many fellow resistors to the hospital, including, for example, interestingly, Jean.

George Canguilhem, the historian of science, who he knows from the resistance and he brings him to the hospital to St. Alban. So I think the context here really convinced these early practitioners of institutional psychotherapy that the psyche and the political were inseparable. And just one other note about this too, I think a lot of them also got...

sort of introduced to politics while they were in medical school. And they were all, they all shared a kind of frustration with the way that in which psychiatry was taught at the time. It's the kind of, it was still very much focused on kind of brain localization and very objectifying and biologizing, you know, detached from politics. So for all of these doctors,

the brain could explain a certain number of things, but it couldn't explain everything, right? You needed to also take into account the social, the historical, the familial, the political, and all of those aspects you could get through

you could get to through psychoanalysis or philosophy or social theory, but not a purely kind of scientific approach. Science needed to be complemented with social sciences or human sciences. So I think that's kind of how they thought about the relationship between psychiatry and politics at the beginning. Again, as you were speaking, I mean, I think part, some of the themes that were really sort of arising for me were a lot of the things that were really present for me while reading the text, which I think

You know, you talk about Tuscany's kind of political formation in Spain during the Civil War, the importance of Catalan anarchism and independence. And I think part of what comes to mind, and you sort of touched on this, but I think I wanted to spend a little bit of time on this.

the centrality of these themes around enclosure, confinement, occupation, and how central these ideas are to the politics of institutional psychiatry. And I think there's just a lot of, in the text, you kind of gesture often to this kind of spatial logic, oftentimes the kind of the spatial logic of

repressive political formations like the settlement, the colony, the asylum, the prison, and then the hospital, as you were just saying, is both a site of confinement and then potentially for some, a site of some kind of liberatory politics. And so I guess I just want to spend a little bit of time thinking about

both the kind of psychological and political effects of these types of enclosure than what these thinkers and practitioners, how they intervened in a way. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big ROAS man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend.

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Yeah, so the first iteration of this project was actually for a conference that Ann Stoller and Federico Finkelstein organized at the New School on colonies camps.

and I forget what else, but it was all about kind of this question of enclosure, right? And so it was really there at the genesis of the project, I would say, thinking about the space, right? The architecture of the space and how a particular architect can have a particular psychic effect.

So basically, so that's just a very central theme, I think, in the book. You're right to point it out. In many interviews, Dos Quellas talked about the deplorable conditions of...

of the camp, especially the refugee camp that he was placed in, right? So when he got to France, the prisoners were sleeping in haystacks. They didn't have heat, but also they had, you know, they were surrounded by barbed wire, by surveillance posts. So all of this kind of infrastructure that was really carceral, right, that reminded him of a prison and that produced a particular set of effects, like something like barbed wire effects.

There was also a new illness at the time called arenitis, like from aren and Spanish, I mean sand, because the sand from the sea was blowing into the prisoner's eyes and it was kind of maddening, right? So there's a kind of effects of the geography, right, that are happening.

And so all of them are very interested, you know, are very much thinking about this, the physical space. Obviously Fanon will get to him in a little bit, I think, but he's also someone who obviously thinks a lot about the, again, the effects of colonialism

of that kind of enclosure right of the mind but before I think it's important to also remember that before the war when you got to Santa I mean I think it's just important to know what psychiatric hospitals looked like at the time they had patients were sort of stacked in overcrowded cells they they so they were like locked locked up and often you could see them kind of

tied to trees in the garden. I mean, it was just really dehumanizing is the word that comes up often also at the time. And one of the first things that they do at Saint-Alban is to tear down the walls of the hospital and to break the walls that separate each cell so that basically...

Patients could walk around everywhere. They could walk around to the village, right? The village was literally integrated into the community to get rid of this kind of carceral environment. And basically everything in the hospital was organized to promote a communal life, to kind of promote a common community.

to foster a new common that could heal a healing collective is the word they use that would repair, restore social, but also psychic links. So, you know, just to give you one example, it's the kind of, you would all eat together at one big table, right? It wasn't like a table for the doctors, the table for the patients, everybody was together. Same thing with the ergotherapy stations, like all of the activities of the hospital were designed to be collective. So it's really in opposition to the enclosure that the collective is imagined. Yeah.

So it might also be helpful at this point to just kind of contextualize or spend a little bit of time just kind of painting a portrait of what on the ground institutional life at both Saint-Albon and Le Bourg look like, and maybe just give a little bit of context to what those institutions look like in practice. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So I think that's really important. So Laborde and Saint-Alban were first and foremost psychiatric institutions, right? So Saint-Alban was a public hospital and Laborde was a private clinic, but both were geared primarily towards psychotic patients. So what we would call today schizophrenia, paranoia, certain forms of autism also, and

And one of the difficulties of, one of the main difficulties of working with psychotic patients that psychiatry faced at this time was that the patients were disconnected from the social world. And this could be a kind of a source of great suffering.

So this is where the work of Jacques Lacan was especially helpful to institutional psychotherapy, especially to someone like Jean-Houry, who really spent perhaps most time thinking about the theoretical and practical ramifications of Lacanian psychoanalysis for psychosis. So just a little parenthesis here, it's also helpful to remember that when Freud invents

psychoanalysis and basically comes up with the notion of the unconscious at the end of the 19th century, he anchors it in what he calls the talking cure, right? So, so transference, what he calls transference. So when you talk to your analyst, you develop an effective unconscious bond with him or her. And it's that bond that could then serve as a conduit to study the structure of other intersubjective relations. So with your family or your coworkers or your friends or whatever. And, and,

One of the issues that Freud encountered when he was dealing with psychosis is that the talking cure didn't work in the same way that it did for his neurotic patients because psychotics just have a different relationship to language.

As Lacan will later put it, Lacan calls psychosis a kind of, he says it results from a hole or a lesion in the symbolic order. So that psychotics not only have a hard time functioning in the social world, but they're unable to signify linguistically, right? To be understood. And this is very clear, for example, when Freud writes about the Schreber case, right? In the case of Schreber,

who has these crazy delusions, Schreber really thinks he is talking to God, right? It's not just a metaphor. So signifiers and psychosis are kind of free-floating. They're not attached to particular reference. And so back to institutional psychotherapy, what's interesting about institutional psychotherapy is that they used, they said,

You know, a lot of psychiatry had kind of given up on psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis had given up on on psychosis. And what institutional psychotherapy did was to say, no, in fact, we can use we need to return to this notion of the unconscious that we need to use psychoanalysis, but we need to rethink transference for psychosis. So transference is not easy.

like it is in the case of neurosis where you lie down and talk about your problems, right? But there is still transference in the case of psychosis. It's just that it's dissociated. It's collective. The word that Tosquelles uses, burst, it's kind of burst transference. So the trick, if you'd like, of institutional psychotherapy was to organize a sort of controlled implementation of the multiple transferential relations that characterize the schizophrenic existence. Right.

So all of the activities of the hospital, so they had things like group therapy, but also theater, musical productions, art, ergotherapy stations. All of these and all of these activities were organized by a sort of self-managed union called the club organization.

And so this was really the kind of crux of the praxis, if you'd like, of institutional psychotherapy. All of these were supposed to give form to the collectivity to kind of institute this new common, right? A new common that would be a healing collective. So this is where the hospital becomes a healing collective. And all of these activities exist to kind of

as vectors for what they call transferential constellations, right? And to prevent them from, so this way I was saying at the beginning that institutions were absolutely central, right? All of these are institutions, but the point is to not let them become oppressive, become authoritarian. And so you build in mechanisms in it that will constantly kind of shake them up,

I mean, just to give one last example, my favorite one is probably the grid at La Borde. That was something that Guattari wrote a lot about. It's called a gris in French.

And this was a double entry chart with a kind of timetable and the names of everybody. So the staff, but also the doctors, the patients and and the work that was assigned to him or her each day. And the idea was to constantly rotate it so that you wouldn't get too comfortable in your own ego. Right. So you wouldn't get too comfortable being the person who does the dishes or the person who makes the beds or whatever, the person who gives the medicine. And and this would be.

the way Guattari talked about it, it was like he said it was an instrument of disorganization, right? That it would prevent the passivity of bureaucratic routines. So you were constantly being shaken up. So in some ways, this is what's interesting is that it was originally a theory about psychosis, right? But in some ways you could use that model to think about subjectivity more generally and to think about...

you know, of things like again institutions more largely and how to make them spaces of healing as opposed to spaces of oppression. Fantastic.

Well, I think I'd like to delve a little deeper into some of the other case studies in addition to Toscaes. But I think before that, I want to zoom out just briefly so that we can then zoom back in. But just maybe, you know, I think it'd be great if we could just spend a moment talking a bit about

the kind of methodological interventions of the text as a whole. You know, I think especially as this is a kind of psychoanalytically oriented program, you know, I think one thing that is striking to me, I mean, I think oftentimes this is not universally the case, but I think in a lot of contemporary psychoanalytic literature, it veers towards either the kind of theoretical or

the practical. And I think there is kind of a lack of historicization sometimes in the field of psychoanalysis. And so I think one thing that

was quite refreshing and grounding about your text is its status as a historical text, first and foremost. And so I think I just wanted to ask you a bit about how you think about or how you conceive of the importance of this being a work of history rather than a purely theoretical text. And

um and i think as an adjunct to that i think i'm also just sort of interested in you know what what is the importance for you in sort of juxtapose juxtaposing particular figures and thinkers and you know i think who you've chosen to include in a particular history is also seems like in and of itself a kind of intervention um so yeah maybe just a little bit yes so um

I think that it's very much a work of history, but rather a work of intellectual history, where I really try to put text and context in conversation. This is how I usually work. And here I'm very much indebted to the work of my PhD advisor, Dominic Lacapra,

or his writings on this. And he conceived of intellectual history as a kind of, as a dialogical exercise between texts and context where the text could post context, the text could post questions to the context and the context could post questions to the text, right? So it's not like, you know,

my goal was not to use the context as a kind of sole explanatory framework for the philosophical ideas, right? I don't want to say like all of this was born at Saint-Alban, Saint-Alban was the sort of origin of all this, but I tried to figure out how, what it means that all of these people were there at the same time, around the same time, at the same place, and what role does a particular setting or context have in fostering these ideas?

So that's what, you know, so I tried to kind of treat the text and the context with the same level of rigor, you know, to kind of delve, you'll notice probably in the book where there's sections that are super theoretical about the kind of theory of psychosis where I go into, you know, like Deep Lacan, for example, and Uri, and others that are much more archivally based or just general historical, right? When I talk about the context of Spain in the 1930s, for example. Yeah.

But I also, the other kind of important thing

methodological tool that I use is the idea of a constellation inspired by Walter Benjamin. But it's also a notion that has been taken up by people like Susan Buck-Morris and Gary Wilder in really interesting ways. So what's cool about the constellation is that it allows you to kind of make up a spatial arrangement without an origin or an endpoint, but it's more how it allows you to see certain links and connections

or to bring them to light or to obscure them basically depending on the viewer's perspective. So you can kind of zoom in and zoom out with the constellation and it avoids the problem of causality, right? I didn't want to say all, you know, this person was indebted to this. I mean, they are indebted, but I didn't want to say this person owes this idea to this idea because it was more like trying to think of ideas as flowing.

So for example, what did this mean in practical terms? I think what's interesting to me about the idea of the constellation is that, again, it allows you to read figures somewhat differently from how they've been interpreted

in generally in intellectual history. So for example, you know, the fact when you kind of highlight the importance of Tuskegee, who was very much a Catalan, as we talked about, like a Spanish, you know, or Catalan, I wouldn't even say Spanish because he was such a Catalan nationalist. When you see his importance for someone like Fanon or Uri or Guattari, some of the big names of what's known as French theory, well, then you realize that perhaps, you know, French theory goes through all these detours that are not through France, right? Or, or,

Another example is, for example, the case of Lacan. So I was really interested in how the work, the ideas of Lacan were so important for institutional psychotherapy. And the story we usually get, this is in the kind of classic Lacan biographies of someone like Elizabeth Rudinesco, was always that Lacan's thought was popularized through the surrealists in the Kojev seminar in Hegel, right? And that's

And I think that's true. But this is a slightly different story of Lacan because I was interested in the fact that all these doctors were reading him, citing him in medical journals, and literally photocopying his thesis and passing it around. So that was the cool archival stuff I found, that you see the books of Lacan that only

are published in the 1980s that are already circulating in photocopies sold to the patients and kind of and diffused like that. So that's a kind of other story.

And yeah, so I think, you know, it depends. It's always about the kinds of points of focus, you know. I think we'll talk about Fanon later, but Fanon's another great example to, you know, we all know again that Fanon was a psychiatrist in addition to being a political activist or a philosopher, but I think,

it's always kind of mentioned as a kind of parenthesis, like, oh yes, and he was also a psychiatrist. When you foreground the role that institutional psychotherapy played in his life and in his theoretical awakening,

it's really hard to read someone's a text like wretched of the earth without thinking about psychiatry. And, and this is, you know, when you see, when you kind of pause on this, he was seeing patients throughout his life, right? So he was kind of seeing patients from seven to 9.00 AM and then, and then writing his, sorry, writing his political texts from seven to 9.00 AM and then seeing patients all day long. So, so, so the, the, the,

the texts, the political texts and the medical work really kind of intertwined, like not only theoretically, but very practically speaking, right? And so, you know, and his name is one of the names that often gets erased in the genealogy of intellectual history, sorry, of institutional psychotherapy.

People often don't mention him as the immediate representative of that radical psychiatric tradition. And that's also very interesting, that eclipse, right? So these are all kinds of questions of focus that I wanted to think about in this project.

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Absolutely. Well, you know, I mean, I think this is as good a time as any, actually, to sort of delve a little deeper into the phenom. And, you know, as you're speaking, I mean, thinking of this sort of constellation of thinkers, and I think at different points in the text, you also refer to a particular kind of deterritorialization of thinkers.

which I think sort of Fanon in some ways exemplifies as the one kind of case study in your text that is, I think you point out, sort of worked at different points in his life, predominantly outside of France, off the continent of Europe. And so, yeah, maybe we could spend a little bit of time on Fanon and just talk

thinking about what is gained from including Fanon within this particular constellation and maybe the kind of importance, kind of both theoretically, politically, intellectually of situating Fanon in this particular constellation. Yeah.

Yeah, so I had, I mean, I had read and even taught Fanon for years, but I really didn't quite grasp the importance of his psychiatric work until I wrote this book, basically.

And part of it is because a lot of his psychiatric works were not published until recently. So when I started to work on this project, I was more interested in seeing whether Fanon had anything to say about institutional psychotherapy in the context of Saint-Alban. So I went to the Fanon archives, which are at this place in France called Limec, which is just a fantastic place.

really a fantastic place. It's an old Abbey in Normandy and just the best place in the world to work. And so they had the Fanon medical texts there and psychiatric texts, and I started to look at them and they were really fascinating. Now they've all been translated into a great anthology that was edited by Robert Young and Jean Calfa. So this anthology has actually really, I think,

given a kind of new burst to Fanon's studies, which has been just tremendous in the last couple of years. And a lot of people, I think several scholars have been trying to really understand the connection between Fanon's medical practice and his political analysis. So I think my own reading of Fanon was very much in dialogue with these other works.

But, but, but so more specifically, what Fanon does is a medical resident at Saint-Alban. He gets there right after medical, he's there for 15 months around 1952, 1953, right after finishing medical school in Lyon. He's one of the people who is again, super really frustrated from the kind of narrowness of the discipline of psychiatric

psychiatry and psychiatric training and medical school. So for him, institutional psychotherapy really represents a kind of fresh road, right? A fresh, a new approach.

he encounters Tuskegas and he participates in all the activities of the hospital. And he's very excited about this. I mean, at this point, he's written already Black Skin, White Masks and a couple of essays, including the North African Syndrome. So he's been thinking already about the relationship between the social and the psychic. But I think institutional psychotherapy really confirms this on a practical level. It confirms what he has said

what he, it confirms what he's kind of figured out philosophically and politically. Now it's grounded in the, in the practice for him. So he, so after, um,

After he leaves Saint-Alban, Fanon takes up a job, a position at Blida in Algeria. And he tries to basically implement some of the techniques that he's learned at Blida.

at Saint-Alban, which we can return to, but there's a whole set of techniques. So he tries to implement them and he's in charge of a ward of European women and a ward of Muslim men. And what's really interesting is that these experiments work really well with the European women and don't work at all with the Muslim men. And he writes this fascinating piece that again is published in the Young and Kalfa Anthology

which is the piece that is kind of at the crux of the argument that I make in the book about Fanon, is that, so Fanon writes this piece with his intern, Jacques Azoulay, where they try to come to terms with the failure of the techniques for the Muslim men. And they realized that in some ways they were applying a kind of imperialist, what he calls assimilated psychiatry, that he was just plopping there instead of adapting it to the social context of North Africa.

So little by little, they start to basically learn more about the context and change the activities. So they invite like a local storyteller. They change the movie selection. They celebrate Muslim holidays. They build what they call a cafe mort, which is like a kind of space where the men can go and play cards or play dominoes. And all of a sudden it starts to work, right? People are starting to feel better. They're less depressed and staring into the blank. And so, yeah.

So for Fanon, this becomes a way to kind of revise the basis of institutional psychotherapy and to sort of

as you say, to deterritorialize it, right? To kind of take it one step further. And because when you think about it, if the goal of institutional psychotherapy was to really scrutinize all social and psychic formations, to kind of look for the last traces of authoritarianism, to prevent reification and stagnation, then Fanon was perhaps, this is what I try to suggest in the book, that he was perhaps the most kind of faithful practitioner of institutional psychotherapy. And that to me was really interesting. Yeah.

GIO NAKPIL: Fascinating. I mean, it seems like in some ways a good segue after talking about the Fanon to sort of take up another case study in the book, which I think like Fanon

is infamous in particular respects, but who you really sort of recontextualize, I think. And think your sort of last final case study of the book is Foucault. And yeah, I'm just interested in potentially spending some time

with your particular recontextualization of Foucault and the kinds of contradictions and overlaps and interactions between, on the one hand, institutional psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and then on the other hand, Foucault's proximity to anti-psychiatry movements.

And so how do you frame in the text Foucault's relationship to psychiatry as a field to institutional psychotherapy? And how does that sort of complicate or enrich the sort of larger historical narrative? Yeah, so the Foucault chapter was the last one I wrote. And in some ways, it was the one that I went most back and forth on because I wasn't sure if it could fit in the book.

Because Foucault, unlike the other figures that I write about, was neither a psychiatrist nor a psychoanalyst. And if anything, he's much more well known for his critical stance towards these two disciplines that he considered emblematic of the kind of power knowledge nexus that he criticized throughout his life.

all of these thinkers were interested in the potential of institutions and Foucault was much more interested in the dangers of institutions, right? The way institutions subjectify, in the concept of subjectification, but also subject formation. So they commented very differently, but I decided to ultimately...

write about him because Foucault mentions institutional psychotherapy at several instances in his career, in his very early work, but also in the 1970s in his 74 Collège de France lectures on psychiatric power, there was a footnote there where he talked about Saint-Alban. And I always sort of, that footnote was always struck me as interesting.

And so I started to dig deeper into Foucault's psychiatric writings and

And this is where I sort of, I was very surprised by what I found because I, again, Foucault is another of those figures that I had been reading and teaching for years, but I didn't realize how important psychiatry and psychology was in his early, his very early days prior to the history of madness. I think we often sort of know the Foucault post-history of madness, but the early Foucault, and again, there's very interesting work coming out right now on this question. Stuart Eldon just published a book on the early Foucault, but there's also like a great work that

in France about this early more phenomenological Foucault. But he engages psychiatry very directly when he's writing-- he writes a preface to Binswanger's

psychiatry. Then he writes, his first book is Maladie mentale et personnalité, which has not been translated into English. It's from 1954. And Foucault sort of never wanted that book republished. But he talks about institutional psychotherapy and a lot about alienation in that book. So I was sort of surprised to find out, to find all this and to realize that Foucault

Foucault even considered being a psychiatrist for a while. And he had a degree in psychology in addition to the one in philosophy. And actually his first teaching position at the university was in psychology. So I think all of this gave me a really different perspective on Foucault. And so what I do in the book is that I trace the evolution of Foucault's relationship to psychiatry, but also the way that psychiatrists interact

took up his work also different in different times, French psychiatrists, including the institutional psychotherapists. So history of madness came out in 1961 and it was hugely influential for institutional psychotherapy because as we talked about already, one of the things that institutional psychotherapy wanted to talk, wanted to highlight was the political nature of psychiatry, which is of course what Foucault does in his book.

So, so he always says that the first thing he did that anybody who arrived at that boat was immediately given kind of history of madness to, you know, to read. So, so it was very, very important to them. But then what's interesting is that there's a kind of second life of history of madness after 1968. And, and this is due to the kind of spread of British and Italian and American to anti-psychiatry in France. And, and,

And this is where psychiatrists, including institutional psychotherapists, start to kind of take a more critical distance vis-a-vis Foucault. Partly because, and I think this is important to say also, is that even though institutional psychotherapy shared many of the concerns of anti-psychiatry,

it ultimately was very different. It was particularly, institutional psychotherapy in particular was very upset by the idea that a lot of anti-psychiatrists spread that mental illness was a pure social construction, right? That it was a kind of angry reaction against familial or social oppression or something like that. For them, that was simply naive, right? Of

course, again, the social and the political was important, but so was the neurological, right? So these were, at the end of the day, doctors who did not hesitate to prescribe neuroleptics, right, even to engage in something like electroshocks. So I think

For the institutional psychotherapists, Foucault became a sort of Bible for the anti-psychiatric movement. And people kind of stopped reading it. And that was a problem for them. But I think the way I talk about Foucault in the book is that he was a sort of fellow traveler to institutional psychotherapy, that he accompanied its development and followed it, but ultimately chose psychology.

a different road, right? And I do also think that psychiatry and anti-psychiatry were really key in helping Foucault reformulate his notion of power in the 1970s. The theory of power that we see, for example, in "Discipline and Punish," that comes, there's a kind of genealogy of this in the book that goes through the psychiatry and anti-psychiatry and the many conversations that Foucault has with these fields at this time. - Great.

Great. And I think, yeah, fascinating. And I think this maybe leads well into-- something that was just coming to mind as you were speaking was one place that I would want to land on is, what do you think that we have to learn from institutional psychotherapy as a movement? How can we make sense of it in our contemporary moment?

And I think in particular, you know, I think in the book at multiple points you kind of ground the text in some contemporary movements. You gesture towards Occupy and other movements of, you know, the last 10 to 20 years. And so I think

you know, I would love to just spend maybe the last 10 minutes or so here on just talking about kind of how we can use this historical material to make sense of a contemporary moment. And, you know, I think even just within the last few weeks and the last month, our particular historical juncture, both nationally and internationally, I think ideas

ideas that stem from institutional psychotherapy, all these things around, you know, enclosure and encampment. I mean, I think these are things that are all really sort of present in our contemporary moment, both around, you know, I think in North America, sort of violence along the

our borders, you know, and then I think sort of internationally just in the last few weeks, you know, the kind of political context in Palestine. So I would just be, yeah, just be interested to hear, you know,

kind of what you think about what these thinkers and these texts have to tell us, if anything, about our political moment. Yeah, so this is something I really thought about a lot when I was writing this book. I began it in 2013.

So sort of in the aftermath of the anti-austerity movements that were emerging in the world. So you mentioned Occupy, but also Los Indignados, Tahrir Square, New Dubai, et cetera. And at the time, so obviously all of these movements made me think about the importance of occupation.

and it was a double occupation, right? It was the kind of the psychic occupation of neoliberalism, but also the actual occupation of physical space of the square, right? The public square. So all of these movements, I think were renewing the conversation around the common, right? So, and there was the book by Dardot and Laval called "Command" which was very, which came out around that time, which was very kind of interesting to me also.

to think about how these movements refused the kind of the private, the economic privatization, but also opened up new democratic imaginaries that would be premised on self-management, non-hierarchical practices. I mean, I remember, for example, Guido Bou had this, was really obsessed over how to speak, who could speak, right? Like who, without hogging the kind of the microphone. So thinking about all of these movements

How could you have a movement, a non-authoritarian self-managed movement that could eventually die, but that was okay. That was the whole thing is that it didn't need to be in the long, a kind of eternal movement. It was all about renewing

the political framework again and again, right? So it's in this context I thought institutional psychotherapy could have something interesting to add to this conversation, especially because in foregrounding the role of the unconscious, so the role of the unconscious in all group formations, but also the collective dimensions of individual development, right? Like the unconscious is always shaped by the collectivity, according to institutional psychotherapy, and the collectivity always has an unconscious.

So the unconscious for institutional psychotherapy was not just something that kind of add on or a supplement to the social theory, but rather the basis of the transferential psychotherapy.

the process, right? It was through the unconscious that you could, that individuals and collectives could explore fantasies, conflicts, desires. So you never have, you would never have a kind of common that was defined in advance. It was always produced in the moment, but it also was never a kind of end point that it was always a work in progress. And similarly,

you know, disalienation in the book is not something that all of a sudden you could say like, oh, now I'm disalienated. It was always something that you strove towards, right? So this was, I thought this was a kind of interesting connection. And then, of course, I wrote much of the book during the Trump years. And again, I thought,

institutional psychotherapy could have something useful to say because, you know, in terms of the election of all these authoritarian leaders in so many places of the world. And once again, thinking about what it had said in the post-war moment about fascism, desire, identification, libidinal politics, the things we've talked about, right?

But also what Foucault described in his preface to "Anti-Oedipus" as the fascism in our heads, right? Why is it that we, so not just, he said, it's not just the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, but it's the fascism that makes us desire authoritarianism, desire redemptive violence, domination, the return to a mythic past. All of these things were really central in Trumpism, right?

central to Trumpism. And I think that in many ways, we saw this right at the time of the Trump election, that neither liberalism nor socialism could really account for what had happened, right? So for liberalism, it was a kind of

of failure of rationality, right? How could people vote for him? And from the kind of more Marxist-y side, it was always seen as a displacement of economic, of a kind of more real economic structure. And I think both of those analysis missed something, right? It missed this kind of,

this possibility of the kind of the importance of the libidinal, the desire. And this is something that was extremely important, especially for the second generation of institutional psychotherapists. Like someone like Guattari devotes a lot of his work to this problem, right? To thinking about the role of desire in politics. This is what Antaeidippus is about, right? It's about why it is that at the end of the day, you vote for people

who will, you vote again, why it is at the end of the day, you vote against your liberation, right? Your emancipation. And for them at the context was May 68, right? So why does, why in May 68, do you kind of settle for these, instead of taking the revolution to its ultimately, to its ultimate goal, you know, to its kind of, so that's something that I thought was interesting. And so, you know, hopefully, I,

you know, what I tried to do is again, kind of show how the unconscious can open up, how this vision of the unconscious can open up new political imaginaries and new comments. And so that's kind of the hope for the book.

And finally, I'd sort of like to just give a little bit of time at the end just to hear about what you're working on now or kind of what kind of projects are on the horizon. What kinds of ideas are you chewing on at the moment? Right, so now I'm actually taking on something slightly different. I've been working on...

on the protests against what's known as the theory of gender for a couple of years now. But it's basically

What I started out examining was the French context where in relation to the law in 2013 that opened up marriage to same-sex couples, the conversation started to shift towards this so-called theory of gender. And the idea was that the gay marriage activists were inspired by a

a theory of gender, which is never quite defined, but it ranged from Monique Vitti to Judith Butler to, you know,

Simone de Beauvoir. And so the idea was that somehow this was the kind of inspiration for all of these laws that were being changed. And what's interesting is that the protests against the theory of gender were really took a spread throughout lots of places, not just in Western Europe, but also in Latin America. So there, you know, in Brazil, in

in Mexico, in Colombia, in Brazil, there was a few years ago, they were kind of burning effigies of Judith Butler and calling her responsible for all of these things. So I'm curious about the network of ideas and how these ideas have spread and what they imagine this theory, what these groups imagine the theory of gender to be and what kind of social and political,

sort of issues are subsumed under that

that category and how it's linked to questions of sovereignty, again, of children, of citizenship, of population, right? Who are going to be the citizens of this world? I think it's part of the question that's being asked here. If the children, because the children seem to be the focus of this, right? So somehow if children are exposed to this theory of gender, they themselves might be non-normative citizens or whatever it is imagined to be. And that will have a kind of domino effect.

So how does this relate to these-- how does the anti-gender protests, how are they a way to reaffirm a sort of national sovereignty in the face of globalization, immigration, et cetera? Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Camille, for making the time. Again, this is a fabulous conversation. And to everyone listening, please do check out Camille's book.

Disalienation, again, out from University of Chicago Press. Thank you so much. It's really been a pleasure.