Disalienation
Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France
240 pages
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24 halftones
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6 x 9
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© 2021
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: A Politics of Madness
1—François Tosquelles, Saint-Alban, and the Invention of Institutional Psychotherapy
2—Frantz Fanon, the Pathologies of Freedom, and the Decolonization of Institutional Psychotherapy
3—Félix Guattari, La Borde, and the Search for Anti-oedipal Politics
4—Michel Foucault, Psychiatry, Antipsychiatry, and Power
Epilogue: The Hospital as a Laboratory of Political Invention
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: A Politics of Madness
1—François Tosquelles, Saint-Alban, and the Invention of Institutional Psychotherapy
2—Frantz Fanon, the Pathologies of Freedom, and the Decolonization of Institutional Psychotherapy
3—Félix Guattari, La Borde, and the Search for Anti-oedipal Politics
4—Michel Foucault, Psychiatry, Antipsychiatry, and Power
Epilogue: The Hospital as a Laboratory of Political Invention
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Review Quotes
David L. Eng, coauthor of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans
"Fascism and collaboration with it are not just political choices: they also demand a particular state of mind. In this study of institutional psychotherapy in postwar France, Robcis presents us a gripping and wide-ranging analysis of authoritarianism’s entanglements with histories of colonialism and violence. Configuring institutional psychotherapy as a form of political theory, Robcis deterritorializes psychoanalysis. In the process, she brings together the psychic and the political, the asylum and the colony, and the mother and the motherland."
Carolyn J. Dean, author of The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide
"This is a superb history of how the theory and praxis of institutional psychotherapy inflects the work of French thinkers. Robcis reframes the intellectual history of a strain of French theory by explaining not only the influence of institutional therapy and antipsychiatry on the works of diverse thinkers, but also the deep political and affective commitments that infuse and shape them. It is an insightful account of the constellation out of which emerged some of the most consequential ideas in late-twentieth-century French thought. An impressive achievement."
Dagmar Herzog, author of Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe
"As Robcis re-creates the imaginative and practical contexts in which a profound revolution in psychiatric care was implemented at the nexus of antifascism, Surrealism, resistance to Nazi occupation, and decolonial insurgency, she models a marvelously fresh approach to intellectual history, with genuinely new takes on such iconic figures as Fanon, Foucault, and Guattari. Disalienation clarifies, from myriad vantages, the constant inextricability of psychic and political processes."
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