Be Incomprehensible
Remembering Francesc Tosquelles
Perwana Nazif
“Il ne me reste que mon accent pour me faire rendre incompréhensible. C’est tres important d’etre incompréhensible,” teases Francesc Tosquelles in a 1985 broadcasted interview for France Culture. “All that is left is my accent to make me incomprehensible. It’s very important to be incomprehensible.”
In favor of spontaneity and a good (but always serious) joke, Tosquelles remarks that his modesty bars him from such spontaneity in an ultimate surrender to coherence. All that is left to chance, then, is the thick Catalan accent with which he speaks in French. Its inversion is just as ungraspable—lifetimes in France have layered and clouded his utterances in Catalan much like the turbid language circulation with his analyst back in Barcelona—an analyst who spoke neither Catalan nor Spanish, and from whom Tosquelles learns that “what counts is not so much what the patient says, but the cut and the sequence,” as he recounts in the transcription of his filmed dialogue in Chimères journal reproduced in the portfolio presented in the following pages. The cloud that is articulation: the wispiness of breaks and discontinuities that simultaneously condense into continuities, the ineffable fog that descends and clings to the soil in an embracing haze. It is as effable as the dew that rises, taking a bordered form in its translation into cloud—a buoyancy with which Tosquelles jests and moves, detaching and joining the clouds that we breathe.
Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles (also known as François Tosquelles) holds a mythical role in French and European histories of radical psychiatry. A seven-year-old working in psychiatric services in the Institut Pere Mata in Reus, Catalonia; a lone figure crossing insurmountable heights across the Pyrenees mountains to France in exile following not a map, but a direction; a militant for the workers and for the Resistance; a doctor who de-pathologizes so-called “madness” and asserts madness as constitutive of being, without succumbing to Surrealist fetishization and romanticization; a pedagogue with a (corroborating) Bible in hand, teaching Freudian “smut” to nuns training as nurses; and hiring sex workers, artists, and others without clinical experience of so-called “madness” to work in the hospital. Layers of mist shroud, coating the myth that is Tosquelles and the histories in which he was enveloped.
Tosquelles, however, cautions us not to confuse the mythical and mystical in his insistence on concrete praxis and historical-material conditions and means. His foundational role in the practice named (posthumously) as “institutional psychotherapy” at Saint-Alban in France during the mid-to-late twentieth century grounds this insistence. Neither fixed model nor formulaic, translations of institutional psychotherapy included Jean Oury and Félix Guattari’s La Borde, Frantz Fanon’s practices at Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital, and later iterations in the 1970s and 1980s throughout North Africa. Saint-Alban’s experimental psychiatric practice of radically transforming the institution, as a constant revolution which was perpetually “curing” the hospital or institution, was distinct from the anti-psychiatry movement’s aim for total deinstitutionalization which, in fact, rendered institutional psychotherapy null. The practice was largely informed by a non-dogmatic Marxist and Freudian framework and contextualized through exile, war, and extermination: the Spanish Civil War and Tosquelles’ exile from Franco’s Spain along with his involvement in organized working class movements against fascism; World War II and Nazi eugenics and extermination against the “sick”; and the Vichy regime’s starvation and so-called “gentle” extermination of the “sick.” Tosquelles, contributing to this mythic role, claimed the institution as a site of refuge through concrete political and militant means. Saint-Alban was active in Resistance networks and offered political refuge for many resistance fighters, refugees, and other political dissidents.
In our current moment where institutional psychotherapy is reemerging in contemporary discourses concerning clinical practices, collective life and organization, and artistic production and dissemination, concrete historicization and coherence is crucial amidst the obscurity that veils Saint-Alban’s experimental practices. The present portfolio is published in anticipation of other forthcoming publications and exhibitions, such as Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut at the American Folk Art Museum in New York; Joana Masó’s forthcoming Humanizing Madness; Tosquelles’ critique of the Surrealist appropriation of Gérard de Nerval in French Politics, Culture & Society, which will appear in a special issue on Tosquelles; and Tosquelles. Curing the Institutions published by Semiotext(e) & Divided Publishing in 2025. The portfolio presents an introduction to Francesc Tosquelles, material practices and daily life at the hospital, and the more obscured, but heavily involved figures at Saint-Alban. Joana Masó’s historical account and analysis of Saint-Alban concentrates on the women who actively shaped, founded, and politicized the care practices of institutional psychotherapy. A more intensive biographical overview of Tosquelles himself, the transcription of Tosquelles’s dialogue from François Pain’s documentary film, A politics of madness, presents the elusive psychiatrist cheekily performing his work, thought, and writing through verbalizations.
The images in the portfolio, some of which include recent anecdotes and annotations by Tosquelles’s daughter Marie-Rose Ourabah, include photographs of daily life at the hospital and the surrounding outdoors (many of which feature the children and animals of Saint-Alban), stills from Tosquelles and his wife Elena Álvarez’s Super 8 film of everyday life at the hospital (the film sought to create an image of social life at the hospital that could present the patients to themselves as well as others), and intimate photographs from Tosquelles’s family album that include images of his life before and after Saint-Alban (family functions, postcards, his office, and images from Septfonds refugee camp where Tosquelles claimed to practice psychiatry best, and where the psychiatry barrack was simultaneously a means of escape from the camp). The photographs, stills, and Marie-Rose’s memories present an image of the social fabric of the hospital, while Masó offers her written reflections, and Tosquelles, himself, is represented through his utterances—speech laden with mirth and incomprehensible coherence.