Francesc Tosquelles's Forgotten Legacy
ADHUC—Research Center for Theory, Gender, Sexuality (Universitat de Barcelona), the Fundació Pere Mir-Puig and the Fundació Antoni Tàpies work together on a research project on Francesc Tosquelles’s forgotten legacy. Tosquelles (Reus, 1912 – Granges-sur-Lot, França, 1994) is known for being a Catalan psychiatrist and thinker, but also for introducing Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in Catalonia, and for driving forward the use of institutional psychotherapy. As a libertarian republican gone into exile in 1939’s France, Tosquelles directed the experimental care center in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole asylum, which ended up becoming the host location of residents and writers —such as Paul Éluard or Tristan Tzara— and a training area for psychiatrists like Frantz Fanon and Jean Oury, amongst others. This new institution became a place of reference on the experimentation of new clinical practices, outsider art and the production of critical texts on the intersection between psychiatry, art, literature, and political contemporary history in Western culture.