OBJECT RELATIONS | Camille Robcis: Institutional Psychotherapy in Post-War France

Object Relations is a series of discussions about the relationship between politics and the psyche produced in collaboration with The Polyphony. Taking its name from the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory of how psyches develop in relationship to one another, this series will explore some questions about the politics of psychotherapy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Episodes will be published every Friday for the next four weeks, beginning (on July 29) with a conversation with Camille Robcis about institutional psychotherapy in France and North Africa. Institutional psychotherapy refers to a movement within psychiatry that occurred in the aftermath of the rise of fascism in Europe. Medical practitioners such as François Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon and Jean Oury began to apply social and political critiques to the practice of psychiatry in the hopes of producing ways of living that alleviated suffering and avoided the fascistic ways of relating to one and other produced by institutions. Camille Robcis is a professor of French and history at Columbia University and the author of Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France, which was recently published by The University of Chicago press. In this conversation she explores the experiences of fascism and ‘concentrationism’ that produced the conditions for Institutional Psychotherapy to emerge and how it relates to a broader history of psychiatry. She also reflects on what this movement offers us in understanding questions of the political, the personal and the psychic.