Review: Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021) Janina Klement (University College London) In January 1940, the Catalan refugee psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles who had just arrived in France, was recruited to work with the French psychiatrist Paul Balvet. Since 1937, Balvet had been the director of a dilapidated and overcrowded asylum in the village of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in Lozère which, situated 1000 metres above sea level in the mountains, counted itself among France’s most impoverished regions. In a giant communal effort that included the local villagers, they prepped the asylum for the war, piled food reserves and planted and harvested produce together with the patients, ultimately saving the asylum population from starvation. Next to its main function as a sanatorium, Saint-Alban became an assembly spot for persecuted intellectuals who began participating in the therapy of the mentally ill, and soon pushed for theorisation of their practice. In 1941, a manifesto
with first principles emerged but only eleven years later, in 1952, the term “institutional psychotherapy” first appeared in a journal article. With Disalienation, Camille Robcis delivers the first history of the French institutional psychotherapy movement for an anglophone readership. The book’s work is to position institutional psychotherapy as a set of ethics of everyday life and experience, and to read it as a political theory (with the ambition of contemporary applicability) of alienation, the unconscious and institutions, more so than to assess its therapeutic merits. Prior to its denomination and introduction to medical literature, institutional psychotherapy was a humanitarian and intuitive act of care during war-time. The bookcover blurb’s claim that Saint-Alban was the only asylum that ‘attempted to resist’ the Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” programme of the mentally ill through supply shortages conceals a dispute among historians (which remains unrectified by the book itself) whether many psychiatrists across France tried the same thing, but ultimately failed to rescue most…