Yes — François Tosquelles (1912–1994), the Catalan psychiatrist, had a direct and important influence on Félix Guattari.
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1. Tosquelles and Institutional Psychotherapy
• Tosquelles fled Francoist Spain and, during WWII, worked at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in southern France.
• At Saint-Alban he helped develop what came to be known as institutional psychotherapy (psychothérapie institutionnelle):
• Instead of seeing mental illness as an internal defect to be managed, he viewed the whole institution as a living milieu that could either worsen or heal distress.
• Daily life, political activity, cultural events, and collective forms of engagement were seen as therapeutic.
• This approach was radically democratic: everyone in the hospital community (patients, doctors, staff) contributed to decision-making and shared responsibilities.
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2. Transmission to Guattari
• Guattari trained under Jean Oury at La Borde clinic (founded 1953). Oury himself was Tosquelles’ student and colleague at Saint-Alban.
• Through Oury, Guattari was immersed in the institutional psychotherapy tradition Tosquelles had shaped.
• At La Borde, Guattari extended these ideas, developing his own practice of transversal relations (breaking rigid hierarchies between roles, allowing communication across “levels” of the institution).
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3. Influence on Guattari’s Thought
• Tosquelles’ approach deeply marked Guattari’s view that psychotherapy is political — institutions reproduce social structures, and thus they can be transformed to foster freedom instead of repression.
• This is one of the foundations of what later became schizoanalysis with Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus, 1972):
• The idea that subjectivity is not just intrapsychic but produced collectively in institutions, social arrangements, and economic systems.
• The therapeutic task is not simply interpretation but restructuring the conditions of subjectivation.
• Guattari often acknowledged Tosquelles’ influence indirectly, by crediting Oury and La Borde, but the genealogy goes back to Tosquelles’ wartime experiments in Saint-Alban.
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✅ In short: Yes, François Tosquelles’ innovations in institutional psychotherapy decisively influenced Guattari. Guattari inherited Tosquelles’ conviction that the “outside” (institutional, political, social) is inseparable from the “inside” (psychic life). This inheritance shaped Guattari’s own political-therapeutic experiments and his later philosophy with Deleuze.
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Would you like me to sketch a genealogy map (Tosquelles → Oury → Guattari → Deleuze & Guattari) to make this lineage of influence visually clear for your seminar notes?
