Divided Publishing

Tosquelles had genius. This remarkable edition at last makes his thought available in English. Its importance cannot be overstated.

“Physicians, heal thyselves,” might be the best epigraph for this revolutionary and revelatory book. Grounded in the assumption that madness, not rationality, is the essence of man, Tosquelles sought to transform psychiatry from a cure for sick minds into a practice of humanization at every level, from the clinic to the community. This book is a landmark achievement.

From the bordellos-turned-annexes of the Almodóvar clinic for the Catalan militia, to a psychiatric barrack at a refugee camp that was also a means of flight, Tosquelles consistently unsettled demarcations of inside and out across the nosological, the analytic couch, the state, and the enclosed hospital—endlessly actualizing, instead, asylum-villages and therapeutic communities. Joana Masó’s careful work maps Tosquelles’s predecessors, inheritors, and legacies to come. This book presents us with existing vectors of escape and the responsibility of proliferating and mutating these at the level of the spatial, the social, and desire.

Tosquelles’s work serves as a model for dismantling capitalist institutions, a revolutionary venture whose essence Joana Masó captures.

Resistance hero, anti-Stalinist Marxist, Surrealist, revolutionary practitioner of social therapy, mentor to Frantz Fanon: Francesc Tosquelles was one of the most innovative thinkers in modern psychiatry, a visionary whose moment may finally have arrived.

This one’s for the split subjects who bend the state to their will, for those who refuse the cure and insist on the delirium of love. For the mad and the militant and the heartbroken who are forced outside the symbolic order and far beyond the fascist dreams of Law, into an insurgent and constellatory solidarity in the rural halls of Saint-Alban and La Borde. This book is a guttural archive of where the clinic meets the commune, reminding us that no matter how we are ordered, disorder can belong to us.

This remarkable collection allows us to experience the genius of Tosquelles in all its dimensions for the first time. We accompany him through his early work in Reus and Barcelona, the development of his therapeutic ideas and inventive practices in war-torn Catalonia and in exile at the Septfonds Camp, his legendary years at Saint Alban and his lesser-known later years in Melun, Nouvelle Forge and La Candélie. Joana Masó guides us to the creative heart of a man whose counter-cultural, counter-intuitive thinking excited generations of intellectuals in France and now inspires the world.