In the middle of the last century, institutional psychotherapy revolutionised psychiatry. In a castle in central France, the renowned clinic La Borde based its revolutionary therapy on the idea that it is not people who are sick but the institutions. In order to cure the sick, we must also cure the institutions. But are the sick institutions curable?
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to do my internship as a psychoanalyst at La Borde, founded by the psychiatrist Jean Oury in 1953. This “psychiatry with a human face,” as Oury used to call it, originated in the work of François Tosquelles, a Spanish Marxist psychiatrist who, during the Spanish Civil War, used to take his patients to the seaside for a swim, something that until then had been unthinkable. Oury, like philosopher Felix Guattari – who also worked at La Borde for several decades, when he wasn’t writing books with Gilles Deleuze – believed that madness was a human right worth fighting for.
It was in this context that Anti-Oedipus (1972) was born – of the conviction that it was not the person who was ill but society and its institutions. At La Borde, the sick were not only allowed to participate in the domestic chores such as cooking, cleaning, helping with laundry, etc., but also to move freely in nature, milk cows, ride horses, play the piano, read a book in the chapel’s library, or sit and philosophise all day long with their fellow human beings.
During my internship, there were as many as a hundred so-called “crazy” residents at La Borde – and yes, they loved to call themselves “crazy” because what else could you be in a crazy world? Among other things, I used to attend Le Club, a chaotic group meeting that took place daily. At these meetings, which could be led by whoever stepped up, everyone had a say in the daily routines, forms of therapy, food, the leadership, and so on. Everyone’s wishes were taken seriously and had tangible consequences. Art played an important role here. Once a year, La Borde opens for a theatre performance in which everyone, carers and patients alike, take part on the same stage. I have rarely seen so much freedom, creativity, and joy in an institution, and in retrospect I can say that this is probably the closest I have ever come to a realised utopia.
This legendary form of therapy is now the subject of Approaching Unreason, a major exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris curated by François Piron. The rooms are filled with documentaries by, among others, François Pain, a director who has explored alternative psychiatry and collaborated with Guattari. One video monitor shows the much-loved, charismatic Oury, very missed since his death in 2014, talking lovingly about his lifelong work with his patients. In another video, cult Butoh dancer Min Tanaka performs his beautiful and deeply human “dance of darkness” for stunned La Borde residents. He shakes all over, falls and rises and falls again, his mouth agape as if in a scream that is no longer heard, as if it in some ways was directed inwards.
In an interview conducted years later, which is available online, Tanaka talks about his relationship with Guattari, the correlation of dance to the transformations of the self, and how he almost tipped over the line to the “other side” that day at La Borde.
The exhibition is imbued with a calm pedagogical logic, broken up here and there by enigmatic artworks such as Sofiane Byari’s surrealist architectural model with marvellous figurines in slide film, and Patrik Pion’s giant paper sculptures which are the products of experimental workshops with patients at the George Sands psychiatric hospital in Bourges. Also on display are Dora Garcia’s Mad Marginal Charts (2018), giant charts based on marginal notes from books by Jacques Lacan and Philip K. Dick. These are interspersed with concepts from Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Franco Basaglia, psychoanalytic puns, as well as statements such as ‘Aus der Krankheit eine waffe machen’ (To turn the illness into a weapon).
Piron has also brought together several inspiring works on the art of transforming isolation into a refuge and protection from societal violence. Michel François’ The TBS Experience (2009) presents projects from a Dutch prison where inmates write and record films about their lives and dreams and analyse them together with staff. Another project is the Centre Familial de Jeunes (1950–1993), a detention centre just outside Paris, where the inmates were asked to make social dramas about their life inside the walls – the final conclusion being that “the prison is outside.”
There are also astounding medical records from 1947 of diagnoses made by doctors at the Val de Grâce hospital in Paris, trying to cure the “Arabness” of paranoid refugees from North Africa. It is a pity that Foucault is no longer alive and that his epoch-defining book Madness and Civilisation (1961) ends at the beginning of the 19th century. He would have found many new examples here.
However, the relationship between the madness of psychiatric institutions and the madness of art institutions is left virtually untouched, which is a pity. On the other hand, I can’t think of any artist who has seriously worked with institutional self-examination beyond therapeutic creativity workshops and the like. In the future maybe? The French art scene is more obsessed with psychoanalysis than ever, and Lacan is currently the subject of an entire exhibition at the Centre Pompidou Metz: Lacan the Exhibition. When Art Encounters Psychoanalysis. At the Palais de Tokyo, I would have liked to see more comfortable hangouts and La Borde-inspired meetings. And why not collaborations with Parisian psychiatric clinics? Let’s hope this is just a first step in a new direction.
If the modernist curator, in the wake of Duchamp, was born from the desire to show art on the artists’ terms, we could say that the postmodern curator was born from the desire to cure the sick art institutions. In recent years, all the significant curators have led large and important art institutions. But is it at all possible to cure the institutions without first trying to cure the curators? I think not. We are still light years away from such approaches. The desire to lead an institution seems incompatible with the desire to be cured. It is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.
But something tells me that this might still be possible at the Palais de Tokyo. It is, after all, the art institution that has come closest to realising the vision of institutional therapy since its inception in the early 2000s. With new Director Guillaume Désanges at the helm, there seems to be a greater openness to engage with both psychological and institutional, individual and social suffering, and the new art forms these sufferings produce. In a manifesto-style statement about the spring exhibitions – which include the archival exhibition Past Disquiet, the group show Dislocations,and Mohammed Borussia’s mid-career survey Signal – he writes: “It’s about… utopias ripping open a messy sky. Fatigue that wakes you up and resting spaces that actively resist. Desire despite violence. Restorative practices in a broken world. The possibility of looking for the future in the past and reference points in the blind spots of history.”
Sure, we’ve heard it before. Artists and curators have always wanted to repair the world, and there are no guarantees that social revolutions can free individuals from their alienation. Just look at what happened to the figureheads of the 68 movement here in France. They themselves became empowered patriarchs (or matriarchs) who oppose contemporary resistance and freedom movements such as MeToo, LGBTQI+, and Black Lives Matter. Even the French psychoanalytic landscape is being torn apart by reactive and progressive movements. Perhaps it is time to also repair those who want to repair the world? Let us hope that the time is ripe for a true art-institutional therapy for everyone, including the therapists. Only then will we perhaps be able to cure the sick world we live in. Both art and therapy have their limits, but united they can be strong.
