The humanization of madness was the emancipatory experience explored by institutional psychotherapy. This book offers a rich contribution to an emerging field. It inscribes this political project in situated social contexts, far from the desert islands of abstract philosophy. - Joana Masó, professor of French Studies at the University of Barcelona, and researcher at the UNESCO Chair Women, Development, and Cultures.

This book uncovers what emerged from the struggle against psychiatric prison systems and explains why non-processual diagnostics are destined to fail. In doing so, it points toward our future, encouraging us to think within a damaged environment that urgently needs healing. - Angela Melitopoulos, multimedia artist and researcher, author of Déconnage (with Maurizio Lazzarato) and Ways of Meaning: Machinic Animism and the Revolutionary Practice of Geo-psychiatry (PhD dissertation, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2016).

A must-read! This volume looks at how François Tosquelles and Jean Oury proposed a revolution in psychiatry. They conceived of the mentally ill being able to move freely inside the hospital as well as outside with family, friends, and neighbours. This approach made it possible to practise psychiatry without walls, resulting in reduced medication and shorter stays for patients, as Oury confirms. - Anne Querrien, sociologist, member of the editorial board of Chimeres, a journal created by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, following institutional psychotherapy since 1986.

These foundational texts by Tosquelles and Oury question the myriad ways in which isolation operates: as a medical practice, within scientific methodology, and across disciplines - including the segregation of social and mental alienation. Confronting the inertia and dominance of nosology, this volume historically situates a dynamic psychiatric practice, in ways that remain insurgent, traversing the aesthetic, scientific, political, epistemological, and ontological. - Perwana Nazif, Art Director at the Los Angeles Review of Books and contributing editor at Parapraxis.

A staunch Marxist, psychiatrist, and 'militant of survival' - as Félix Guattari described him - Tosquelles is a totally crucial figure who embodies the most unorthodox of approaches to madness. In this edited volume, Psychotherapy and Materialism, these two seminal texts - the other is Jean Oury's vital take on institutional psychotherapy - bear witness to an entirely different history of the post-war period in Europe: one in which the psychiatric hospital becomes a political laboratory. - Carles Guerra, curator of Tosquelles: Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field.