La Borde wasn’t exactly anti-psychiatry or anti-psychoanalysis in the blunt sense—at least not in its early decades.
It’s more accurate to say it was anti-institutionalist and post-psychoanalytic before the term existed.
Here’s the nuance:
1.
Not Anti-Psychiatry in the Cooper/Laing sense
- Anti-psychiatry (David Cooper, R.D. Laing, Franco Basaglia) often involved outright rejection of psychiatry’s diagnostic authority and the asylum system.
- La Borde did use psychiatric tools (medication, observation, clinical notes) when useful, but it refused the authoritarian, custodial model.
- Instead, it practiced institutional psychotherapy (from François Tosquelles): you transform the asylum from the inside by making its structures open, participatory, and constantly self-questioning.
2.
Not Anti-Psychoanalysis in the Surrealist “burn the couch” way
- La Borde never declared psychoanalysis useless; in fact, Guattari’s early work was influenced by Lacan, and Jean Oury was Lacan’s student.
- But they refused the closed transference dyad as the sole frame. Psychoanalysis was one tool among many—alongside art workshops, collective decision-making, and architectural changes.
- This attitude was proto-schizoanalytic: psychoanalysis had insights into desire, but it had to be expanded beyond the family romance and interpreted in machinic, collective, and institutional terms.
3.
What La Borde was
- A laboratory of transversal practices: people, roles, and spaces constantly crossed boundaries (patients could run workshops, staff could share meals and chores).
- An ecology of care: attention to how material arrangements (furniture, gardens, music rooms) affected psychic life.
- A site for political experimentation: open to artists, militants, philosophers; the clinic was porous to the outside world.
4.
So before schizoanalysis…
- La Borde was already doing something that:
- Challenged psychiatry’s custodial logic without abandoning psychiatry entirely.
- Expanded psychoanalysis without rejecting its insights.
- This is why Guattari’s later schizoanalysis wasn’t a sudden break—it was naming and theorizing a way of working he’d been immersed in for decades.
If you want, I can map “La Borde’s position” on a two-axis chart:
- One axis: Pro–Anti Psychiatry
- Other axis: Pro–Anti Psychoanalysis
…so you can see how it sits in a quadrant that’s neither outright rejection nor full allegiance, but rather transformational refunctioning.
Do you want me to make that map?
