Populism and Gender Ideology

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-10-22

Abstract Gender has largely become a rallying enemy for populist movements throughout the world. This chapter first locates part of the intellectual history of this movement in the French protests against the legalization of same-sex marriage. It then claims that quite the same way that populism seeks to re-incorporate the empty place of democracy, so-called ‘gender ideology’ highlights the gap between biology and culture. The chapter then traces the unfolding of this discourse in political and legal discourse. It analyzes the reception of European Convention on Human Rights and EU law by national legal actors in order to show that, as they are perceived to unsettle gender norms, European legal developments (such as ECHR case law on surrogacy or EU law on free movement and the recognition of marriage and procreation in same-sex families) trigger States to foreground of arguments of national identity (legal) and state sovereignty (political).

La psychothérapie institutionnelle

Études · 2024-11-07

Mouvement né pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la psychothérapie institutionnelle révolutionne la psychiatrie en France, en s’opposant à l’aliénisme et à la psychiatrie biologique. Elle est à l’origine de la psychiatrie de secteur, une psychiatrie « hors les murs » qui vise à rendre les soins de santé mentale compatibles avec une vie dans la cité. C’est aussi une école de pensée qui permet d’étudier les tendances aliénantes de toute institution et d’expérimenter des pratiques pour les contrecarrer. Dans un ouvrage ( Désaliénation , Seuil, 2024) qui traite de la psychothérapie institutionnelle sous l’angle de l’histoire intellectuelle, à travers notamment les grandes figures de ce mouvement, l’historienne Camille Robcis revient aussi sur la compréhension originale du fascisme développée par ce courant.

:<i>Mettray: A History of France’s Most Venerated Carceral Institution</i>

The Journal of Modern History · 2023-03-01

Frontmatter

University of Pennsylvania Press eBooks · 2022-08-10

Book Review

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A · 2022-01-31

1

2021-01-01

Abstract This chapter recounts the birth of institutional psychotherapy in the hospital of Saint-Alban, in the Lozère region of France, during the Second World War. It begins with the life and work of the Catalan-born psychiatrist François Tosquelles, one of the most important theorizers of institutional psychotherapy. After fighting alongside the POUM during the Spanish Civil War, Tosquelles fled to France and was placed in the refugee camp of Septfonds. This experience of activism in radical politics and of war-time psychiatry shaped his thought and his practice in fundamental ways. He arrived in Saint-Alban in 1940 where he met the cast of characters who all contributed to the development of institutional psychotherapy, including Lucien Bonnafé, Georges Canguilhem, Georges Daumézon, Paul Éluard, and others. Saint-Alban during the war became a center of psychiatric innovation and intellectual effervescence but also of political resistance against Vichy and fascism.

3

2021-01-01

4

2021-01-01

Abstract This chapter traces Michel Foucault's shifting notions of the psychiatric, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Foucault was never directly involved in the practice of institutional psychotherapy, and he remained much more skeptical of the emancipatory potential of psychiatry throughout his life. Yet, we can see him as a sort of "fellow traveler" to institutional psychotherapy, following its development closely but ultimately choosing a different road. Foucault's attention to psychiatric questions, to the asylum, but also to institutional psychotherapy and antipsychiatry largely contributed to his critique of norms in the 1960s and shaped his new theory of power in the 1970s. Psychiatry provided a template for Foucault to rethink the political from a theoretical but also from an activist perspective and to study the mechanisms of what he would later call "disciplinary society" and "disciplinary power."

Epilogue

2021-01-01

Abstract The epilogue explores how the insights of institutional psychotherapy can help us think through our political present, from neoliberalism to the rise of new authoritarian leaders throughout the world. It highlights the importance of the unconscious in politics and the social dimension of the unconscious, in the hope of opening up perspectives for other political imaginaries and new commons.

Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France

2021 · 3 citations

• Political Science
• Psychoanalysis
• Political Science

"From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy Regime's "soft extermination" let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. Yet, in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban and came to be known as "institutional psychotherapy" would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.Though the movement was varied, and the point was never to devise a dogma or a model that could be applied indiscriminately, institutional psychotherapy did attempt to offer an "ethics," or a practice of everyday life. Among its most important principles were the belief that theory and practice were inextricably linked, and that psychiatric practice was explicitly political. Camille Robcis traces the history of institutional psychotherapy from its inception to its various transformations between 1945 and 1975. Each chapter of the book is organized around a thinker who was either at Saint-Alban or who engaged with institutional psychotherapy: from François Tosquelles, Franz Fanon, Jean Oury and Félix Guattari, to Michel Foucault. They made up a fascinating constellation within which unexpected relationships between characters, contexts, and ideas--often seemingly fragmentary of tangential--emerged"--