Camille Robcis’s book Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (University of Chicago Press, 2021) now in French, traces the intellectual history of doctors and thinkers who shared strong antifascist and anticolonial convictions, as well as a dissatisfaction towards mainstream psychiatry. It recalls the many experiments and inventions in the field of mental health, and demonstrates its influence on sociology, philosophy, art, and psychoanalysis. It examines the work of doctors such as François Tosquelles, Jean Oury, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, as well as the philosopher Michel Foucault, all of whom connected institutional psychotherapy to social and political analysis. Robcis studies these ideas in their contexts but also shows us how some of the tools that these thinkers imagined can still help us to think through our present today.

Camille Robcis will be in conversation with François Piron, curator of the exhibition Approaching Unreason, on view at Palais de Tokyo until June 30, 2024. The exhibition puts together artistic practices inspired by institutional psychotherapy.

 

Venue : le hamo, salon des communs