French Politics, Culture & Society

Francesc Tosquelles described his psychotherapeutic approach as being “like a sewing machine in a wheat field.”¹ This elliptical phrase describes at least four dimensions of what would later be coined “institutional psychotherapy”: its aesthetic inspiration, its Marxist origins, its clinical intervention, and its interdisciplinarity. Tosquelles's phrase comes from Lautréamont's characterization of beauty, which became the aesthetic paragon for the Surrealists: “the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” As his thesis on Gérard de Nerval illustrates, Tosquelles privileged artistic expression as an indicator of mental illness. But as his championing of the artworks produced by the patients at Saint-Alban also demonstrates, he regarded art as a vital medium for improving mental health. Tosquelles's expression thus subverts the Surrealist credo: instead of idolizing the exquisite corpse, Tosquelles elevates psychic dynamism. Moreover, by situating psychotherapy in the wheat field, Tosquelles takes it beyond the walls of the institution and puts it in the domain of the worker. This resituating reveals not only the proletarian sensibility motivating his investment in non-hierarchical clinical practice, but also the idea that treatment is foremost a kind of work, one performed collaboratively, socially, and not always by professionals. By removing the sewing machine from the dissecting table, Tosquelles also conveys the institutional intervention of his approach, which treats patients as subjects experiencing the pathologies of freedom rather than as objects for the scientific gaze. Finally, institutional psychotherapy is like a sewing machine in a wheat field because it stitches together different disciplines, from Freudian psychoanalysis to anti-fascist politics. This special issue emulates Tosquelles's sewing machine by bringing together different perspectives to celebrate the surprises of his legacy and its resistance to dissection.

The humanization of madness was the emancipatory experience explored by the psychiatrist François Tosquelles at the rural hospital of Saint-Alban in France. He developed a critique of psychiatric and literary approaches that pathologized, fetishized, or sublimated madness. This article will study Tosquelles's PhD thesis, which was defended in 1948 at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. In “Essai sur le sens du vécu en psychopathologie: le témoignage de Gérard de Nerval,” he argues that, far from being the expression of the Romantic genius, or, conversely a mere symptom of madness itself, the delusion of the end of the world in “Aurélia” is to be understood as the poet's last effort to singularize his existence before committing suicide in 1855. This can be read as Tosquelles's response to the Surrealists’ “othering” of madness exemplified by Paul Éluard in his Souvenirs de la maison des fous written in Saint-Alban during the war.

This article examines the mid-twentieth century movement of institutional psychotherapy as a situated practice of resistance, focusing on its entanglements with media, milieus, and the politics of madness. Emerging from the Saint-Alban hospital during the Vichy regime, institutional psychotherapy—developed by figures such as François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, and Félix Guattari—sought to heal the psychiatric institution itself by transforming its spatial, social, and transferential structures. Moving beyond intellectual history, this text analyzes migration, geo-psychiatry, catastrophe, transference, and the club to demonstrate how media techniques actively participated in constructing therapeutic milieus. It discusses transference as a collective, multi-referential process distributed across spaces and objects; the notion of geo-psychiatry as a critical reworking of human geography against colonial and deterministic narratives; the understanding of psychosis as a creative effort at world reconstruction following catastrophic lived experience; and the club as an autonomous institutional object fostering activity, conflict, and disalienation.

This article examines the decisive role played by Francesc Tosquelles and the institutional psychotherapy of Saint-Alban in the formation of Frantz Fanon's psychiatric and political thought. Focusing on Fanon's fifteen-month apprenticeship at Saint-Alban (1952–1953), it argues that the conceptual tools he later mobilized to analyze colonial alienation, violence, and disalienation were forged within a shared epistemology of psychiatry that rejected constitutionalism, emphasized lived experience (vécu), and conceived mental illness dynamically as a pathology of freedom shaped by social, historical, and institutional conditions. Drawing on references to Lacan, Sartre, and Anders, it shows how Fanon transposed Tosquelles's social therapy—from the psychiatric institution to the colonial situation—conceptualizing colonization as a pathogenic shock that freezes collective personality and liberation struggle as a process of social and historical therapy.

When Frantz Fanon first arrived in Saint-Alban in 1952, he dedicated to François Tosquelles, the director of this asylum, a copy of Peau noire, masques blancs. His Sartrean approach to race relied on the notion of authenticity: in colonial France, Black men and women were doomed to bad faith, even in the intimacy of love; they wore “white masks.” This was a far cry from Tosquelles's approach developed during the Spanish Civil War, then in Vichy France. In wartime, camouflage is a tactical move that serves for protection. Fanon would remember this lesson during the Algerian War of Independence. In L'An V de la révolution algérienne, he makes an anti-culturalist argument. Veiling and unveiling are not to be understood in terms of authenticity, for they keep changing in evolving contexts; the goal is to escape the surveillance of French soldiers. Political urgency thus trumps identity.

This article argues that Kamel Daoud's Meursault, contre-enquête is not a thematic rewriting of Albert Camus's L’Étranger but a struggle to reconfigure what Jacques Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible.” Applying a method of sensory archaeology, it investigates suppressed colonial trauma in Camus's text. It analyzes how Daoud contrapuntally reshapes L’Étranger's core sensory motifs—the sun, beach, and name—to transform Meursault's metaphysical absurd into a sensible, historical trauma. Daoud displaces Camus's philosophical sensory system with a traumatic sensory system, forging an embodied register for the previously unseen victim. The novel's tragic structure reveals the contagion of colonial violence, converting Camus's philosophical monologue into an ethical testimony that demands a response.