Francesc Tosquelles

As part of the exhibition Critical Episodes (1957-2011). MACBA Collection, Level 2 of the Museum presents two new episodes of the MACBA Collection. One of these episodes is Déconnage, a video-essay by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato that looks at the life and work of the psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles (1912-1994). In Déconnage, one of the pioneers of critical psychiatry in post-war Europe is introduced. Anti-psychiatry is recovered here through the figure of Francesc Tosquelles: a discourse and practice that address not mental illnesses, but vital, social and ethical problems. Anti-psychiatry foresaw the dysfunctions that would eventually afflict people in contemporary societies.

In France, 45,000 of the 70,000 institutionalized mentally ill patients died in French psychiatric hospitals during World War II. But not in Saint-Alban. It all began with a meeting in Lozère in a medieval castle converted into a psychiatric hospital in 1821 of four young psychiatrists: Paul Balvet, Francesc Tosquelles, Lucien Bonnafé, and André Chaurand. They hid those threatened by the ruling regime—members of the Resistance and Jews—and fought against hunger and Nazi oppression.

This composite film has been edited by Carles Guerra out of five reels shot by Tosquelles between 1953 and 1967 and preserved by his son up until very recently. The absence of sound has been filled in with intertitles that provide clues that help us recreate who might be filmed, where and when. These are images that in spite of their muted character reveal the extraordinary network that constituted the bulk of institutional psychotherapy in the French Postwar period, including figures like Frantz Fanon, George Daumézon and Jean Oury.