TOSQUELLES:
HEALING INSTITUTIONS

Author: Joana Masó
Published by Divided Publishing
English
400 pages
16.5 x 24 cm
Softcover
ISBN 978-1-7395161-8-5

Price: 128 lei


Having fled to France in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles joined the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, where he carried out a transformative clinical practice for over twenty years, in part under the Vichy regime.

Saint-Alban was an extraordinary event, a commune, an informal refuge in a time of extreme danger, a sort of upwelling spread through word of mouth. Those entering the asylum were welcomed, and that welcome never stopped. Care happened through a broad range of communal activities for staff and patients: theater, cinema, collective writing, horticulture, the sorting of colored pearls, gymnastics, singing, a monthly newspaper. The dignity of every patient was of foremost importance.

Now, as then, warmongers are willing to poison and slaughter without blinking, making all of life difficult if not impossible: the pull of such asylums is obvious. Tosquelles is a ground-breaking record of the life and work of the founder of institutional psychotherapy. Assembled by Joana Masó, with many texts translated to English for the first time, it is a direct encounter with Tosquelles’s clinical, intellectual, and political writings.

"Tosquelles’s work serves as a model for dismantling capitalist institutions, a revolutionary venture whose essence Joana Masó captures."—Paul B. Preciado
"“Physicians, heal thyselves,” might be the best epigraph for this revolutionary and revelatory book. Grounded in the assumption that madness, not rationality, is the essence of man, Tosquelles sought to transform psychiatry from a cure for sick minds into a practice of humanization at every level, from the clinic to the community. This book is a landmark achievement."—W.J.T. Mitchell