Tosquelles: Healing Institutions

A ground-breaking document of the life and work of Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles. With many texts translated for the first time in English, Healing Institutions is a direct encounter with his clinical, intellectual and political writings, assembled by Joana Maso. Exiled at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Tosquelles joined the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in Vichy France, carrying out a transformative clinical practice there until the 1960s. He worked with and against what he had, so that the hospital he helped to create was also the destitution of the structure that was there before. Saint-Alban was an extraordinary political event, a commune, an informal refuge in a time of extreme danger, a sort of upwelling spread through word of mouth. When someone arrived at the asylum, they were welcomed and that welcome never stopped, it was reinforced throughout their stay. This was Tosquelles' notion of hospitality. Each patient was necessary to what was called Saint-Alban. Care happened through a broad range of communal activities for staff and patients: theatre, cinema, collective writing, horticulture, the sorting of coloured pearls, gymnastics, singing, a monthly newspaper. Given state coercion, here the issue was above all the survival of dignity for every patient. The idea of combative asylums is not far-fetched, considering our own conditions: the generalised pathology in society at large, neoliberal governance, technical geopolitics willing to slaughter without blinking, to poison the atmosphere, to extract the minds along with the minerals, to make all of life, human and not human, quite difficult.