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There is a persistent theme of liberation in narratives about the history of French psychiatry that dates to the founding of the profession. According to legend, in the early 1790s, at the height of the Terror, Philippe Pinel unchained the patients at the Salpêtrière and Bicêtre hospitals in Paris, as depicted in the famous painting by Tony-Robert Fleury from a century later that still hangs at the Salpêtrière. At the turn of the twentieth century, as the asylum system that Pinel and his students had developed demonstrated its profound failures, advocates for mental hygiene and services ouverts sought to create treatment systems that could address mental illness at its onset without the cumbersome and stigmatizing process of internment. In France's North African colonies, psychiatrists invoked the myth of Pinel's liberation of the insane as they struggled to found modern psychiatric hospitals in the Maghreb, which they claimed would free the mentally ill from what they called barbaric local traditions. And at least one biography of Frantz Fanon claims that upon his arrival at the Hôpital psychiatrique de Blida-Joinville in Algeria, he unchained patients as he passed through his wards.
In her brilliant new book Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France, Camille Robcis tells the story of a very different liberatory psychiatry. The book describes the movement to develop institutional psychotherapy that began at the Saint-Alban hospital under the direction of François Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist recruited to the asylum in 1940. The book's chapters cover the professional and intellectual trajectories of the major proponents of institutional psychotherapy and what Robcis calls their ‘fellow travelers’ (p. 110), including Frantz Fanon, Jean Oury, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The concise volume deftly weaves together the careers of these figures and their historical and political context to produce an incisive history of the