This article seeks to explore institutional psychotherapy’s politically informed practice by highlighting two key concepts: crisis and resistance. It first briefly sketches a conceptual overview of the two concepts, paying particular attention to the complicated interactions between their political and therapeutic meanings. Following each conceptual elaboration there is a discussion exploring the ways in which the concept has been used by two key members of the institutional psychotherapy movement, Frantz Fanon and Félix Guattari.

In Of Other Spaces Foucault coined the term "heterotopias" to signify "all the other real sites that can be found within the culture" which "are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted." For Foucault, heterotopic spaces were first of all spaces of crisis, or transformative spaces, however these have given way to heterotopias of deviation and spaces of discipline, such as psychiatric hospitals or prisons. Foucault's essay provokes us to think through how spaces of crisis and critique function to open up disruptive, (...) subversive or minoritarian fields within philosophical, political, cultural or aesthetic discourses. This book takes this interdisciplinary and international approach to the spatial, challenging existing borders, boundaries, and horizons; from Claire Colebrook's chapter unpacking the heterotopic spaces of America and Mexico that lie beyond reductive ideological spaces of light and darkness, to a Foucauldian reading of the Zapatista resistance. With essays on politics, philosophy, literature, post-colonial studies, and aesthetics from established and emerging academics, this book answers Foucault's call to give us a better understanding of our present cultural epoch."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Guattari’s prescient final text, Chaosmosis, argues that the conditions of Capital responsible for the current social-psychic-ecological crisis of migration demand modes of analysis capable of grasping their complexity, ones grounded in the ethico-aesthetic. It is a text that draws directly from the therapeutic practice that he, Tosquelles, Oury, and others in the Institutional Psychotherapy (IP) movement developed in their clinics. This work entailed the inclusion of aesthetic practices that work to deterritorialise the institution, shifting from carceral sites and creating therapeutic (...) spaces of care and refuge. This article explores the centrality of an ethico-aesthetic approach to the understanding of therapeutic space within the sites and clinical practice of Institutional Psychotherapy. Looking especially at daily life and the inclusion of aesthetic practice, it examines the particular notion of asylum that emerged in these sites that so informed the clinical and critical work of Guattari and Deleuze, and draws connections to the current global crisis of migration in the necessity of such sites to the forced segregation between those deemed mad and sane. (shrink)