“The central journey charted here is the rise and fall of ‘institutional psychotherapy’ – a model of psychiatric treatment developed by Francois Tosquelles, a psychiatrist who fled from Catalonia to Vichy France... In composing this narrative arc, Robcis feels in total command of her archival material. But what stands out is her articulation of the mediums and agencies that served to propel concepts in unison, while others were overshadowed and eclipsed. As a non-specialist, I was swept along by her ability to make clear, nuanced argument amid richly-textured contexts. The last chapter presents a thrilling account of how Foucault made parts of his own history disappear (though downplaying the extent to which he was once entangled amongst Saint Alban’s ideas-figures). Photographs and illustrations add to the sense of ideas being made manifest in material form – through architecture, posters, letters and artworks – as well as embodied by doctors and patients through their densely-woven (dis)associations... This dynamic approach marks this book out from others that take a more detached stance on what ‘French Theory’ is and how it can be understood – it is far more relational, playful and in sync with the spirit of her protagonists (and less ‘French’ too).”

Polyphony

"Totally fascinating."

J. J. Mull | New Books in Psychoanalysis

"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."

David L. Eng, coauthor of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans

"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."

Carolyn J. Dean, author of The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide

"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."

Dagmar Herzog, author of Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe