Tosquelles

A landmark anthology of Francesc Tosquelles's intellectual, clinical, and political writings, many available in English translation for the first time.

Often consigned to legend, the life of Francesc Tosquelles reads as an adventure story of clinical, political, and collective experimentation around healing institutions. Joining the Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole psychiatric hospital in Nazi-occupied France, Tosquelles invented what would become “institutional psychotherapy” with poets, film critics, photographers, and psychiatrists including Jean Oury, Agnès Masson, Frantz Fanon, Tristan Tzara, and Paul Éluard. 

This first anthology of Tosquelles’s writings shines a light on his forgotten history, from his engagement as a psychiatrist during the Spanish Civil War alongside anti-Franquist and anti-Stalinist communists, to his progressive return to Catalonia following his role in the “cultural revolution” of “institutional psychotherapy” in France. Through translations of texts never before available in English, Tosquelles’s powerful voice reminds us how important politicized relations to institutions are in our times of sick institutions, scapegoating of strangers, and globalized war."Tosquelles’s work serves as a model for dismantling capitalist institutions, a revolutionary venture whose essence Joana Masó captures."
—Paul B. Preciado

"This one’s for the split subjects who bend the state to their will, for those who refuse the cure and insist on the delirium of love. For the mad and the militant and the heartbroken who are forced outside the symbolic order and far beyond the fascist dreams of Law, into an insurgent and constellatory solidarity in the rural halls of Saint-Alban and La Borde. This book is a guttural archive of where the clinic meets the commune, reminding us that no matter how we are ordered, disorder can belong to us."
—Rosie Stockton

"Resistance hero, anti-Stalinist Marxist, surrealist, revolutionary practitioner of social therapy, mentor to Frantz Fanon: Francesc Tosquelles was one of the most innovative thinkers in modern psychiatry, a visionary whose moment may finally have arrived."
—Adam ShatzFrancesc Tosquelles (1912–1994) was an avant-garde psychiatrist. Born in Catalonia, he fled to exile in Southern France during the Spanish Civil War. From 1940 to 1962, Tosquelles worked at the Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole psychiatric hospital in Lozère, where he pioneered the revolutionary, nonhierarchical practices of “institutional psychotherapy." In 2021–24, Tosquelles’s work was the subject of a touring retrospective exhibition at the Abattoirs, Musée–Frac Occitanie Toulouse; the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB); the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), New York.