Abstract

This text explores a series of media practices developed in the fame of institutional psychotherapy, through the prism of “geo-psychiatry.” Institutional psychotherapy was a psychiatric reform and resistance movement which emerged in postwar France against the racist and ableist extermination of patients with mental and physical disabilities. Initiated during the Occupation by the Catalan psychiatrist François Tosquelles and a collective of Marxist psychiatrists and activists, Surrealist artists, Jewish refugees, and catholic nuns at the clinic of Saint-Alban (among whom Geoges Canguilhem, Nusch Eluard and Paul Eluard), the practice was later developed by Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, and Jean Oury—who all spent time at Saint-Alban—as well as Anne Querrien, Ginette Michaud, Danielle Sivadon, and Fernand Deligny, to give a non-exhaustive list.

Geo-psychiatry proposed an environmental and decolonial approach to mental healthcare: it (re)politicized the notion of “human geography” to the extent of questioning society’s politics of space, which embraced the concentrationary modes of confinement. Media, such as film, photography, printing, and cartography, served to collectively re-invent and re-imagine the geography of the present: to produce environments, institutions, and milieus that would facilitate psychological therapy and healing. Emerging as practices of resistance, these interventions appear crucial in light of current debates on media and environmentality, as well as the social and participatory repurposing of technology within a project of disalienation.