The Urban Mental Hospital And The State of Research

By Meike Schalk

My interest in the collective, CERFI which was active during the late 1960’s and 1970’s in Paris, focuses on their excursions into urban questions, oscillating between theoretical and program work, including political engagement, and psychoanalytic experience and practice.

Jean Oury.

CERFI’s history is closely connected to the history of the psychiatric clinic, La Borde, which was established in 1955, at a castle at Cour-Cheverny, by Jean Oury. It served as the locus for discussions on “institutional psychotherapy,” and, in the beginning, it was Jacques Lacan’s seminars which formed the intellectual basis for these discussions. Félix Guattari joined the clinic in 1956, as a political activist whose interest was focused on the idea of desire. La Borde was not comparable to any traditional psychiatric institution, but was rather an experimental hospital that emphasized group dynamics.

The movement, “Psychotherapie institutionnelle,” was based on the therapeutic concept that a hospital should be run as a collective living space. It reconsidered the relation between the patient and his or her environment, and initiated research into the possibility that everyone would take responsibility: the patients as well as the staff and the head of the institution. This formula of self-management was supposed to reinstitute the notion of respect for the other and for oneself, and, simultaneously, to give decision-making power to everyone involved, to maintain a life close to reality and to prevent the patient from passing into a ghetto of madness, the isolation of a clinic.

When Oury bought the castle, he was obligated to keep all the employees present at the time of purchase. He wanted La Borde to bring together not only professionals, and patients with serious problems, but also people from the outside. Guattari and all his friends, students, and other intellectuals, mixed here with locals, and thus there was often conflict. During the Algerian War, La Borde also became a hiding place for political activists refusing military service, a clear indication of Oury’s and Guattari’s political stance.

Preferring the term “institutional analysis”– an analysis that operates from within institutions themselves – to “institutional psychotherapy,” Guattari sought to push the movement in a more political direction, toward what he later described as “a political analysis of desire.” It was an attempt to deal, collectively, with psychoses. Transference came to be seen as institutional, and fantasies were seen to be collective: desire was a problem of groups and for groups.

During this time, three events had a big impact on the formation of specific political consciousness for most students studying during the 1960’s: the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, and the Cultural Revolution in China meant for many the beginning of a left-wing radical engagement, a militantisme gauchiste. The discussions on the Algerian War, which ended in 1961, split opinion within the French intellectual world. A minority supported Algerian independence which meant being in opposition to the French Communist party (PCF: Parti Communiste Français). This opposition manifested itself mainly in two places, 1) in the UEC (Union des Etudiants Communists), the youth organization of the PCF, which acted mostly as an autonomous movement, and 2) in the UNEF (Union Nationale des Etudiants de France), the main student organization. The external contacts were Félix Guattari and the clinic La Borde, which was in the middle of extremist left-wing political actions, mostly in the currents of the “les oppositionels,” small groupings of diverse ideological directions within the left that were not in line with the main movements within the UEC. The clinic itself served as a place for meetings and political discussions.

In 1965, Félix Guattari founds La Société de psychothérapie institutionelle (SPI), and the La Fédération des groupes d’Etudes et de recherches institutionnelles (FGERI), a network of 300 psychiatrists, psychologists, teachers, town planners, architects, economists, filmmakers, academics and others, dedicated to a general analysis of institutional forms of oppression. Within the working groups, it was Guattari’s ambition to bring together a highly variegated group of people, in order to foster a discussion that would produce as many diverse and complex viewpoints as possible. FGERI published the interdisciplinary journal, Recherches, and gave birth to CERFI, an association of approximately thirty people. CERFI pursued concrete research studies in the spirit of a synthesis between the human sciences and interdisciplinary research, and wanted to be engaged politically, yet also have a professional practice. Guattari had been invited by students to participate in the groups reflecting on mental health among students. Among the network of the militant students, he recruited “moniteurs” who started to work and live at La Borde as administrators, nurses, educators, and in all other possible capacities without salary. Most students were involved on and off during approximately two years. The general interest in psychoanalysis was strong, and many who worked at La Borde underwent group analysis with Félix Guattari. From 1968 onward, after submitting a program to Dr Oury, and discussing it with him, CERFI collaborated with La Borde. Its responsibilities are defined as: taking care of internal activities by running ergotherapeutic studios for pottery and painting, managing a library and a club, running a cultural program, organizing group therapy and specialized education, such as learning about medicine and group therapy techniques, and arranging excursions. CERFI provides a service within the hospital that is distinct from the activities of the clinic, and as such acts as a link to the world outside.

Influenced by the experiences in La Borde, CERFI formulates its goals as the invention of a new form of interdisciplinary and institutional work that should not be alienating, and further, to establish a new relationship with the State, whereby one could utilize its resources without being used by it. Moreover they wanted to form a “new race of militants” who operated from within the system, which meant to understand the unconscious dimension of one’s engagement, to investigate the aspect of desire as the real and living substance of all social entities, and finally, to solve financial problems through research contracts. The experimentation with collective work would be the material and human basis for these innovations. “We had understood that we had to connect the mode of living to the mode of politics.” This kind of practice that would engage the researchers on a personal level, was called “recherche-action,” transforming the “gray matter” of research into socially engaged research, whereby everyone, professional or not, could act as a researcher.

To escape “scienticism,” CERFI chose to work on particular case studies, whereby research would not be distinguished from the fields of “concrete history,” which could be described as the relationship among social phenomena, the techniques of scientific institutions, and the personal life circumstances of the researchers. “Our seriousness in the work was very much connected to our seriousness concerning the revolution. We saw ourselves as practitioners, not as researchers.” “Research-action” – for example what Félix Guattari calls research about “quality of life” – can probably also be regarded as a response to the “elitism” of the French academic system. The idea behind such a research method was to focus on subjects such as space, territory, and the city. It had to break with the way of organizing knowledge which cut it off from the way the it was produced. A true analysis of the quality of life would also imply research on the masses, which, at the same time, would develop a politics of desire within the research groups themselves, and also research on the topic of desire for change. Guattari suggests three possible directions: exploratory research, taking the margins seriously and considering them as social laboratories of sorts; the exchange of experience among communities, institutions, and all other types of experimental collectives; and, finally, an exploration of different countries and different layers of society.

Recherches

In the beginning, Recherches is the journal that publishes the research of the different working groups of FGERI. One could loosely distinguish three periods: In the first year, 1966, five issues appear under FGERI. In issue no. 6, “Architecture – programmation – psychiatrie” (1967), where CERFI is mentioned for the first time, a more strategic approach concerning public funding was developed. This began the second period, where CERFI was able to survive and produce Recherches with research commissions from the government until 1975. The third period began after 1976, when Recherches developed into a more conventional type of research journal, guest edited by various people and focusing on themes relating to urbanism. This final period lasted until 1980, when CERFI finally broke apart.

During the first year, the journal covers the subjects of: institutional pedagogy, the relation between architecture and psychiatry, economics, psychiatric institutions, medical practice, the city, education and politics, and feminism. The research groups move into different sectors, and questions of architecture and urbanism, for example, are not only treated as issues for specialists, but as important for the psychiatrist, the pedagogue, the economist and the filmmaker as well. In this way, different experiences not only should be reflected within an institution – a community, a profession with its different languages, conscious and unconscious structures and history – but also should contribute to knowledge collected in multiple social networks. The goal is to fill gaps where there is no information – or insufficient or repressed information.

Recherches no. 6 – a thick, 300-page special issue on how to “program” psychiatric hospitals in relation to the city and society, where 60 architects of FGERI, members of CERFI and leading psychiatrists collaborated – was read by people in the Ministère de l’Equipement. The government was looking for new ideas at that time, and CERFI, which offered a different research approach, was asked to do “research on research.” The Ministry for Transport And Urbanism was shaping “the new towns” – five new satellite cities close to Paris that were being planned, and there was some space for experimentation. CERFI received written contracts, and, for one and a half years, they could also meet in a room in The Ministry and discuss various issues with members of the government.

One can discern certain focal points of interest: CERFI’s work connects issues in Institutional Analysis to urban, political and architectural questions. “Architecture - programmation - psychiatrie” is based on a discussion about programs and norms that are applied to psychiatric hospitals, from the point of view of the concepts of sector psychiatry (psychiatrie de secteur) and institutional psychotherapy (psychotherapie institutionnelle). While institutional psychotherapy – which had developed from sector psychiatry – focuses on using and connecting a maximum number of institutional facilities, which then would be transformed from within, the agenda of sector psychiatry, on the other hand, is to break down big institutions and disperse them into different sectors of the city. Its goal is to move outside of the hospital, to avoid the consolidation of the institution, and finally, to get rid of all hospitals (and other institutions).

The article “For a democratization of architecture,” written by the architects Alain Fabre, Alain Schmied, and Americo Zubléna, first published in Recherches no. 1 (1966) and reprinted in issue no. 6 (1967), highlights the role of the architect. His/her responsibility was to collect relevant social information, as well as the necessary techniques for the development of a project of architectural significance, which included two fields of research: the political on the one hand, and the development of techniques of means of communication on the other hand. It basically would give the architect more responsibility beyond the creation of form, by involving him/her in a collective process, a process on the political level.

This issue of Recherches was supported by Max Querrien, the director of architecture of The Ministry for Cultural Affairs, together with the direction of the Health and Social units of The Ministry of Social Affairs. Max Querrien was director of architecture under Minister André Malraux from 1963-1968. To change the traditional structures of his department, he introduced, in 1967, so called “working groups,” of architects, urbanists, economists, painters, geographers, sociologists, and administrators, to reflect on contents of planning and architecture, and a reform of architectural education. This organization mirrors CERFI’s network, with Félix Guattari in the center: four groups were established, one group concerned with the question of “Human Sciences,” and whose president was Henri Lefèbvre, and among its twenty-five members were the architects Georges Candilis and Max Stern, and Félix Guattari. The group “Architecture et Urbanisme” was headed by Max Stern, and among its thirty-seven members were Georges Candilis, Bernard Huet, Henri Lefèbvre, and Jean Maheu. A third group worked on scientific and technical matters, its president was Henri Vicariot, and among its twenty members, Jean Prouvé and Paul Andreu, and another group consisting of twenty-four members was engaged in “Formation artistique.” All components of the opposition to Gaulliste power were represented here. Politically, Max Querrien supported the idea of an “administration of mission” (administration de mission), which did not fit in with the ideas of André Malraux, qua Minister of Cultural Affairs. As a consequence of the events of May 1968, Max Querrien had to leave his post in October of that same year.

Max Querrien states in his letter to Recherches: “With the particular example of mental disease and the psychiatric institutions, the more general problem of life conditions of diverse social groups in society becomes obvious. One can pose the question of which way they are either consolidated or interrogated by this or that type of architecture and urbanism.”

The contributions refer to a technical report, “Programme d’un hôpital psychiatric urbain de moins de cent lits,” by the doctors Guy Ferrand and Jean-Paul Roubier, which was originally produced for the Ministry for Social Affairs. This report radically turns against the modern formula of “hospital-villages” – hospitals with large capacities, often situated outside of town. It considers them outdated, and thus proposes small hospital units of only hundred beds, located at central locations in the city, as a more contemporary response to medical needs. The idea of small units of psychiatric facilities stands in opposition to the traditional idea of a hospital with a fixed number of beds. These small units could use a therapy that was connected to and supported by the urban sector’s medical activities, and engage the entire scale of alternative means of interventions. Beside the dispersed insertions of those units, they recommend the establishment of institutions outside the hospital, such as therapeutic studios, day hospitals, systems of house consultations, ambulant treatments, placement in familiar situations and clubs, to avoid the production of a determined social space that is entirely animated by only one big institution. The study also questions the norms of construction applied to psychiatric hospitals, arguing that they might be too rigid, thus paralyzing all profound architectural research and compromising possibilities of adaptation to actual needs and the local situation. As examples, they mention the institutions La Borde, Soisy-sur-Seine in the 13th arrondissement in Paris, and the Marcel Rivière à la Verrière institute, which are all private facilities. Further, the vocabulary of a psychiatric hospital should be radically different from that of a general hospital. At the psychiatric hospital, the room is, from an objective standpoint, the place where the patient sleeps. Subjectively, it is his/her personal refuge, the intimate domain, where it is possible to retire and to relax from the efforts of readapting and dealing with interpersonal contacts. The statement is: The psychiatric treatment does not consist in placing the patient in a bed behind walls, but what is lacking within psychiatric units is the disposition of true places of encounter between the patients, their families, that is, a connection to a normal social environment.

Almost all the “fathers” of sector psychiatry, Georges Daumézon, Pul Sivadon, Henri Ey, Francois Tosquelles, Germaine le Guillant, Roger Gentis, Lucien Bonnafé, Jean Oury and others are represented here. Georges Daumézon, the medical head of the clinic of Saint-Anne at that time, emphasizes, in the introduction, the necessity of a dialogue among everyone involved in the making and running of the hospital. He proposes that the hospital should be regarded as a kind of network, where the stations are organized so as to offer the patients the possibility of different experiences. The role of the therapist is to guide the patient from one point to another, in a sequence according to the therapeutic plan adopted. Contributors to this issue, besides the doctors – Georges Daumézon, Roger Gentis, Guy Ferrand and Jean-Paul Roubier, Jean Aymé, Jean Oury, Lucien Bonnafé, and Félix Guattari – were Nicole Sonolet, the architect who realized the psychiatric hospital L’Eau Vive at Soisy sur-Seine, and the architects, Alain Fabre, Alain Schmied, Albert Schwartz, Americo Zubléna, and the urbanist Jean-Claude Petitdemange, among others.

The architects criticize the separation between architecture and programming as purely institutional and demand a concept for an integration of both. Nicole Sonolet’s study “Un centre de santé mentale urbain: Proposition d’une experience,” is the only example actually drawn, and a result of reflections following the construction of her own project, a psychiatric hospital at Soisy-sur-Seine in the 13th arrondisement in Paris, and discussions with different doctors, social assistants, staff, patients and family members of patients. The theoretical hospital project is designed to function as an instrument among other medico-social facilities in the city. Taking into account the argument of the efficiency of small hospital units woven into the city fabric, utilizing exterior services, and therefore encouraging encounters between those inside and outside, her actual urban and architectural proposal is organized like a labyrinth of alternating green courtyards with volumes of different heights. The complex is accessible from all sides. The units, internally connected, can be entered independently from the street level and work autonomously as well. The urban mental hospital in fact opens towards a normal social space.

The discussion is taken up again in Recherches no. 17, “Histoire de la psychiatrie de secteur ou le secteur impossible?” published in 1975 as a double issue with mostly the same authors. While the first part focuses on the history of sector psychiatry, the second part discusses the programming of psychiatric “sector” institutions for the “new towns” of the Paris region. The texts are pieced together in the manner of an assemblage, consisting of interviews, mainly done at the end of 1974, and earlier written texts, that give the impression of a round table di- scussion. Here, the model of “the urban mental hospital,” as discussed in Recherches no. 6, is projected onto the city as an urban model for the programming of the new towns.

In this way, both concepts of institutional analysis and sector psychiatry turn the issue of the psychiatric hospital into an urban (therefore political) and programming agenda, instead of the very limited concept of the hospital as an architectural task aiming at the consolidation of typologies (which is how things have been, all the way to the present).

Liane Mozère.

In the beginning of the 1970’s, CERFI takes a new turn. A group of a few people, close to Félix Guattari, was constituted which called itself the “mafia.” François Fourquet, Liane Mozère, Lion Murard, Michel Rostain, and Anne Querrien were part of it. In the same year, they received a commission from the Ministère de l’équipement to investigate the question of “how to determine the social demand concerning collective facilities, considering the unconscious desire and the institution, and what can this study give us on the very practical level of programming of collective facilities?” CERFI suggests exploring a do-main, which was close to them, the mental hygiene, and a terrain that was unknown, the new towns that at the time only existed on paper.

The following year, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari publish L’Anti- Oedipe, which is dealing with a political analysis of desire, and consequently, in Recherches no. 13 (1973), CERFI reflects much more on their specific “mode of production”: discussing the epistemological and libidinal conditions of their research, their erotic dispositions and relationships to power, the group analytical activities, militant interventions, collective writing, and overcoding: the writing on writing.

The topic of issue no. 13, “La généalogie du capital. 1: Les équipements du pouvoir,” touches on theories of the city, considering the city’s multiple functions, where economical, urban, juridical, social, and technical fields intersect. It suggests a perspective from the development and history of collective facilities, forming orders, places, and networks. The collective facilities seem to structure the actual city in its materiality and representation. Architecture is seen as the hardware for the productive machine that is the city, serving in particular the “territorial fixation” of the moving population. With this objective, the researchers attempt to overcome two actual prominent discourses about the city, which they consider too narrow: the “progressiste” and the “culturalist,” pointed out by the theorist Françoise Choay. The first model corresponds to a rationalist humanism, as found in the Charta of Athens, where the city constructed is modern and whose urban functions are determined by industrialization. The second pole fights functionalism and sees the city as a cultural product before being functional. CERFI envisages the city as a human product instituted in the field of desire and of the unconscious. The history of the production of collective facilities should consider the real production, the produc- tion of desire, and the production of discourse. CERFI calls this history “genealogy,” the “real” history of collective facilities, borrowing from Foucault’s use of the concept of genealogy, whereby an interpretation of the established discourse should be confronted with the revelation of a latent discourse. Genealogical research produces active interventions into, or specific events of institutional analysis, as well as contributing to knowledge of the historical conditions of the production of this discourse.

As far as practical measures are concerned, CERFI suggests that we understand the activity of “programmation” in a wider sense than simply as the constitution of a document called a “program” which contains the spatial determinants to allow the architect to build his/her plans on. “Most often, the programmer cannot base his/her work on knowing all the conditions of functions and the steering of collective facilities, especially in the area of an urban agenda, where functions and roles are so numerous and where areas of competence and responsibilities are delimited. The different specialists lack a collective dimension concerning their object, so that we try to circle around the notion of investigating social desire.” This is precisely the gap where CERFI sees possibilities to move into the process and to position itself, as a mediator between researchers, users, administrators, urbanists and architects. François Fourquet identifies four aspects which played a role in the procedure: “metteur en scène,” “interlocuteur” in their production, “présentateur” of a background plan (of events, persons), and “commentateur” with one’s personal interpretation.

CERFI was more or less active until the end of 1980. It had lost its funding after the government changed in 1974, and Guattari withdrew more and more. Small groups, which managed their finances individually, continued working with external collaborators until 1980. CERFI broke up because of internal fights about leadership, mainly directed against Guattari, and different opinions concerning prominent issues such as terrorism, among others. The internal problems reflect general differences between radical left-wing intellectuals at the time, and here two of the most prominent representatives, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, took different positions in this public discussion, Foucault rejecting terrorism as political means, unlike Deleuze. The journal Recherches ceased publication six month later.

Research and the architects

The generation of architects that grew up around May 68 can be described as a generation of architect-intellectuals, those with an interest in research, who were politically active, organized in specific movements, participating in urban struggles, criticizing surveillance, institutional discipline and control as practiced in schools and mental hospitals, for example. Foucault’s work, especially Histoire de la folie (1961), Naissance de la clinique, (1963), and Surveiller et punir (1975) formed their theoretical orientation.

The institutional response to architectural research after 1974 was a suggestion of topics like “theory, epistemology, pedagogy of architecture,” “operational procedures and architectural concepts,” or “the integration of architecture in its milieu,” etc. Among the experts selecting research projects were theoreticians such as Joseph Rykwert, Manfredo Tafuri, and Michel de Certeau. In 1976-1977, Florence Contenay, who had already worked under Max Querrien, was responsible for structuring the selection process for the architectural research. The topics of interest during this time were oriented around themes that had developed through 1968, and were mainly concerned with the condition of the production of architecture. The expert group here consisted of, among others, Françoise Choay, Hubert Damisch, Reyner Banham, and Giancarlo De Carlo.

“Paper architecture” marks a period of crisis and re-orientation during the entire 1970’s, as well as a unique era of the production of ideas, and the interrogation of how architecture and urbanism are produced. CERFI’s activities, excursions and experiments into urbanism and psychoanalysis can best be grasped in this historical context. They reflect a desire for change that was in the air, and one can probably say that CERFI wasn’t on the sidelines, but was rather an active part of a larger reform movement within the Zeitgeist.

CERFI’s projects and its history, collected in Recherches, cannot be distinguished from the personal stories of those participating, and, as a dense fabric of private thoughts, theoretical reflections, reports of institutional practice, activism and experimentation, it represents the exciting logbook of an intellectual excursion into issues that are once again central in contemporary discourse on planning and architecture, which is concerned with collective work, questions of authorship, the agenda of control and the distribution of power and influence.

Sources
CERFI, Recherches no. 1, January 1966
CERFI, Recherches no. 2, February 1966
CERFI, Recherches no. 3-4, April 1966
CERFI, Recherches no. 6, “Programmation, architecture et psychiatrie,” June 1967
CERFI, Recherches no. 13, “Les équipements du pouvoir: Généalogie du capital 1),” december 1973
CERFI, Recherches no. 14, “L’idéal historique: Généalogie du capital 2, June 1974
CERFI, Recherches no. 17, “Histoire de la psychiatrie de secteur ou le secteur impossible?,” 1975
CERFI, “Un projet de recherche sur les équipements collectifs,” unpublished manuscript, 1967
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1996)
Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main, 1991)
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire, in Hommage à Jean Hyppolite (Paris, 1971)
Interview with François Fourquet, Paris, September 2, 2001
Félix Guattari, “Contribution à la discussion sur les équipements collectifs et l’aménagement urbain,” unpublished manuscript 1975

Félix Guattari, “La qualité de la vie dans les etablissements humains,” unpublished manuskript, Januar 23,, 1973
Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans, Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 1989)
Eric Lengereau, L’Etat et l’architecture, 1958-1981: Une politique publique? (Paris, 2001)
Janet Morford, L’histoire du Cerfi: La trajectoire d’un collectif de recherche sociale, Mémoire de DEA, EHESS (Paris, 1985)
Interview with Anne Querrien, September 4, 2001
Jean-Louis Violeau, “Mai 68-Mai 81: L’entre-deux-Mai des architectes itinéraire intellectuels,” IN EXTENSO, Recherches à l’Ecole d’Architecture Paris-Villemin (1999)

Meike Schalk is Associate Professor in Urban Design and Urban Theory, and Docent in Architecture at KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm. Recent publications include Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialisms, Activisms, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections, co-ed with Thérèse Kristiansson and Ramia Mazé (2017), Architecture and Culture, Vol. 5 (3), “Styles of Queer Feminist Practices and Objects in Architecture” (2017), and Field 7, “Becoming a Feminist Architect” (2017), both co-ed. with Karin Reisinger.