Workshops,clubs,transferences: Tosquelles,women’s legacies and literary groups

Abstract

Between April 1952 and October 1953, François Tosquelles and Frantz Fanon jointly organized nurse training at the Saint-Alban Hospital in Lozère, in southern France. This practice of group training had been inaugurated by Tosquelles during the Nazi occupation in the Second World War in the same hospital, and even earlier in Catalonia, when he led a six-month seminar based on Jacques Lacan’s 1932 thesis on paranoia to train therapeutic teams at the Pere Mata Institute in Reus. Group training was combined with practical reflection on the self-organization of patients through clubs, workshops, and cooperatives, as well as with the ‘transferential constellation’ and ‘scattered transference’ developed between the different collectives. This article recounts another genealogy of collective practices in institutional psychotherapy, which gives prominence to women such as psychiatrist Agnès Masson. It also focuses on the role of reading and literature in working with groups in the hospital when, during the 1970 and 1980, Tosquelles promoted discussion and reading groups, with texts by Gabriel Ferrater, Roman Jakobson and Charles Baudelaire, which made possible another circulation of the word and meaning within the psychiatric institution.