LIAS Panel Discussion: Disalienation and Praxis: Experiments in Institutional Critique

Fantasies of Disalienation

Kerstin Stakemeier, AdBK Nürnberg

The term disalienation, emerging from psychiatric practices in France in the early 20th century, does not denote alienation's antonym. Rather, as much as alienation is a practice – one of romantic subjectivization – disalienation too characterizes a form of individuation: one that dissociates alienation and brings the fantasies grounding its imaginations into play. I want to demonstrate that disalienation should be undersetood as a fantastic practice of integration.

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Disalienation by Design

Nancy Luxon, University of Minnesota and LIAS Senior Fellow

How do institutions mediate between social and mental alienation? Following thinkers like Foucault, Goffman, and Althusser, often institutions are construed as simply contributing to existing orders and their interpellations. Colonial hospitals in particular have long been understood as complicitous in shoring up more clearly political patterns of exclusion and marginalization. More recently, scholars have reached backward to radical institutional collectives in order to think forward to the resources needed to sustain long-term anti-colonial and anti-racist challenges. Fanon’s psychiatric hospitals in Algeria and Tunisia, along with Harlem’s Lafargue Clinic, played a central role in reframing racial inequality in terms of psychic injury (United States) or in terms of disalienation (North Africa). Rather than thinking on utopic and theoretical terms, this paper closely examines the infrastructures – the provision of food and medicine, institutional architecture, and nursing staff – that allowed for certain infrastructural spaces to serve as fulcrums for political change while others remain entrenched in existing practices of marginalization and exclusion. Drawing on archival resources from the Hôpital Psychiatrique de Blida, this paper considers the architectural design of a range of hospitals in Europe and North Africa from the 1930s-1960s; the redirection of the hospital as social institution away from the practices of Vichy and racial segregation, and towards political revolution; and the provisionments that made these hospitals “inbetween spaces” to sustain political and social change. This paper thus offers a re-visioning of how institutions might re-circulate people, materials, and the repetitions of social time so as to “unseat mastery” and its structuring recurrence within political and social order.

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Geo-psychiatry and Disalienation

Elena Vogman, ICI-Berlin

This talk addresses the media practices developed in the fame of “institutional psychotherapy” through the prism of “geo-psychiatry.” Institutional psychotherapy was a psychiatric reform and resistance movement initiated in postwar France by François Tosquelles, Lucien Bonnafé, and Frantz Fanon among others against the racist and ableist extermination of patients with mental and physical disabilities. 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.

Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. She is Principal Investigator of the research project “Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe” at Bauhaus University Weimar and Visiting Fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Her current work focuses on the media histories of institutional psychotherapy and its intersections with decolonial discourse, psychoanalysis, feminism, and ecological thinking. She has published two books, Sinnliches Denken. Eisensteins exzentrische Methode (Sensuous Thinking. Eisenstein’s Eccentric Method, 2018) and Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project (2019).

Imported Psychiatry and “Patient voices”: Reconsidering the “Fann School” in Senegal through a Patient File

Romain Tiquet, Centre Marc Bloch

This paper focuses on a patient file compiled within the specific framework of psychiatric therapeutic care at Fann in Dakar (Senegal) in the mid-1960s. The Fann clinic, which opened in 1956, just a few years before Senegal’s independence, quickly became a center for transcultural psychiatry and a hub for intense reflection on African psychopathology. The institution was deeply shaped by Henri Collomb and his team, who sought to develop a "psychiatry without borders"—one that aimed to dismantle the walls of the colonial asylum, integrate local understandings and representations of mental disorders, and place patients’ voices at the heart of the therapeutic process.

Collomb brought together psychiatric psychoanalysts, ethnologists, sociologists, and anthropologists to explore the social, economic, and cultural dimensions of mental illness in Senegal and, more broadly, in Africa. By examining the file of Moustapha H., who was hospitalized at the psychiatric clinic in 1965 and 1967, this contribution seeks to analyze how the Fann approach, centered on the "liberation of speech," allowed for a genuine consideration of patients' testimonies and those of their families.

This contribution interweaves clinical insight with historical perspective, exploring three ways of conceptualizing the patient. First, I will examine the "patient as actor." The emphasis on speech liberation at the core of Fann’s therapeutic approach ensured that patients' and families' voices were not only taken seriously but also served as both a therapeutic tool and a valuable resource for historians. Second, I will explore the "patient as symptom," shifting the focus from the disorder itself to what the patient’s psychic manifestations reveal about the broader social, cultural, and historical context—such as family tensions or the "cultural in-between" of an increasingly urbanized postcolonial society. Lastly, I will discuss the "patient as object." Both the Fann medical team and historians face the risk of reducing the patient and their family to mere subjects of cultural analysis, thereby confining them within a rigid interpretative framework. In this final section, I highlight the limitations of the Fann experiment and the methodological challenges historians encounter when using psychiatric patient files as sources for social history.

Romain Tiquet holds a PhD in African Studies from the Humboldt University Berlin. He has since been named 2019 CNRS researcher at the Institut des Mondes Africains (MMSH Aix-en-Provence) and, since September 1st, 2022, at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin. After working on forced labor in Senegal, he has turned his focus to the history of madness in West Africa. He leads the ERC project "Governing Madness in West Africa" (MadAf 2021–2026). He has published several articles on patient files and methodological reflections on sources for studying the history of madness in West Africa.