Institutional Psychotherapy

François Tosquelles, a founder of institutional psychotherapy

Institutional psychotherapy (French: psychothérapie institutionnelle) is an approach to psychiatric care that treats the organization and relationships of a care institution as part of the treatment itself. It developed in France from the 1940s through work associated with François Tosquelles, Jean Oury, Félix Guattari, Frantz Fanon, and others.

History

The approach took shape in the 1940s and 1950s at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in southern France, where Tosquelles drew on Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan's thesis on paranoid psychosis to rethink how hospitals affected patients. Many psychiatrists trained at Saint-Alban went on to spread its methods to other institutions.

In 1953, Jean Oury founded the La Borde clinic near Cour-Cheverny, in close collaboration with Guattari, and it became the best-known site of the movement. From the 1960s to the 1980s, Lacan's influence on Oury's thinking shaped a second phase of its development.

Principles

Institutional psychotherapy holds that hierarchies, routines, and the way staff and patients relate to one another can either support or obstruct psychiatric care, so the institution itself must be continually examined and treated. Practices associated with it include regular meetings, therapeutic clubs run with patients, the rotation of roles and responsibilities among staff, and the sharing of everyday tasks.

Its practitioners have emphasized that it is not a fixed method or a model to be copied from place to place, but an approach developed through local experiments and adapted to each setting.

Influence

Guattari's work at La Borde informed his writings with Gilles Deleuze, including Anti-Oedipus and the concept of schizoanalysis, as well as his later ideas on ecosophy.

See also

• La Borde
• Félix Guattari
• Jacques Lacan
• Schizoanalysis