Professor Camille Robcis (Columbia University, NY) will give a presentation titled 'Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France'.

Abstract: My talk traces the history of institutional psychotherapy, a movement born in France during the Second World War that called for the profound transformation of the theory and practice of psychiatric care, through the lens of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. According to institutional psychotherapy, the asylum could function as a microcosm for society at large, as a space to promote non-hierarchal and non-authoritarian political and social structures, as a template to better understand alienation and offer perspectives for 'disalienation'.

Professor Robcis' book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy and Radical Psychiatry has just been published by Chicago University Press.