‘We Took Care of the Network’
Hannah Zeavin writes about how Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles reimagined institutional psychotherapy in the twentieth century.
From the article:
During his two decades at Saint-Alban, Tosquelles worked with other psychiatrists, a team of nuns, and his patients to pioneer a movement that would become known as “institutional psychotherapy.” Unlike the later movement for anti-psychiatry, developed in the 1960s, including by Tosquelles’s own students, institutional psychotherapy stopped short of doing away with institutionalization altogether, but it proposed undoing the hierarchal arrangements that governed the typical asylum and establishing reciprocal relations among patients, staff, and society at large. Everyone wore the same clothes. Many of the asylum’s walls—both those within buildings and those that made up the premises’ outer perimeter—were demolished. Patients still had individual psychoanalytic sessions, but the emphasis was on group activities and cooperative life. As Tosquelles put it, “We took care of the network.”
Read more here!