Part Two: A Madhouse Against the Nazis: the Story of François Tosquelles and Saint-Albans

Margaret continues talking with Allison Raskin about the antifascist asylum in France that armed partisans and reinvented psychiatry.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that actually comes out
twice a week, and yet I've been introducing it as
a weekly podcast for however long because in my head,
two episodes is one episode, because I do it by
weeks and that's the way that my brain is able
to handle it. My name is Margaret Kiljoy and my

(00:23):
guest today is Alison Ruskin. How are you?

Speaker 2 (00:27):
I'm good. How are you doing on our second episode
of the day.

Speaker 1 (00:30):
I know, well, you're the author of Save the Date,
which came out yesterday, and I just want to ask
how did the release go.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
I'm gonna I don't believe in manifesting at all, but
for a hot second, I'll pretend to, and I'll say
it went so well amazing, it took the world by storm.

Speaker 1 (00:54):
Yeah, and probably nothing world endingly bad happened randomly on
the day that your book came out.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Well, god, I hope not.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
Oh, I just did the current administration and all that stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
I know, Well, probably something rather bad happened is every day.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Yeah, But you know, the whole weird subtitle of this
show is that when there's bad things happening, there's also
good things happening, and we pay attention to the good things,
even if we have to understand the bad things to
understand how the good things are related to the bad things.
That's my ontological viewpoint that makes the world into good
and bad. Don't question that too much. But instead we

(01:36):
can say that our producer is Sophie who isn't here today,
and our audio engineer is Rory hi Rory hi Ror,
and our theme music was written for ud By Unwoman.
And this is part two of a two parter about
San Albam, which I did not successfully find out how
to pronounce, and so usually when I read French, I

(01:57):
just start dropping letters and hope for the best. And
I think I'm vaguely better at pronouncing it than i
am other languages I do try. I hate. One of
my least favorite things is exactly what I'm doing right now,
where podcasters are like, I can't pronounce things. It's literally
your job to figure out how to pronounce things and
then say them on air, and I try to do that.

(02:18):
I just want to say I try to do that,
and I don't always succeed. And so now I'm paying
way more attention to this and making it all worse.
But this is part two about a revolutionary in multiple
senses psychotherapy psychiatric hospital in rural France that changed a
lot about how psychotherapy and psychiatry can be done and

(02:42):
sometimes how it has been done. And when we last
left our hero, he had just crossed the Pyrenees and
then set up in a concentration camp and then gotten
out of the concentration camp to go take over, not takeover,
but go help as Saint Alban and pick up after

(03:04):
the work of Agnes Messon, who's you know, as I've
complained about, largely left out of history. So Toskida shows
up at this place that had a really solid anti
fascist reformer who had been hard at work for years,
but she's been gone for about two years at this point.
The guy who replaced her was genuinely also pretty good
like he was trying to make things better. He just

(03:26):
wasn't as like, specifically groundbreaking as other person. The fact
that he was trying to make the place better is
probably why he invited an anti authoritarian socialist to come help.
At the time that Francesque shows up, there there's only
twenty caretakers and a few nuns. I don't know how
many patients are there. The nuns were from the Order

(03:47):
of San Regi, which is the patron saint of at
risk women and orphans. So he's a world famous psychotherapist
who's run huge chunks of shit for the Spanish Republic.
But because he's a foreigner, the French government is like,
you can be assistant nurse. So his salary and job
title is assistant nurse. But as far as I can tell,

(04:10):
he's kind of running the place, or rather, since he's
pretty into non hierarchy, he's restructuring the place in a
way in which his ideas are agreed upon by people.
And when he shows up, he's really impressed by what's
been started. Because again he doesn't write out the things
that women have done. He's specifically impressed by the abandoning

(04:32):
of straight jackets. He's like, oh shit, that's amazing. You know.
He wanted to change things up right away and keep
going even further. A lot of the infrastructural changes have
been done, but there's all this other stuff that he
wants to do, and people start letting him do it.
He's never formally in charge, at least as far as
we're going to get in the story this week. Now
he's actually named after him, this place. They've changed the

(04:54):
name of it, it's still around. And one of the
reasons that people are down to listen to him is
that he says that the average French person knows how
badly they fucked up by not helping in the Spanish
Civil War. Remember, I was saying, how last time, how
they like they had a popular Front, they're supposed to
stop fascism, but then didn't do anything when their neighbor
fell to fascism. You know, he said, quote they all

(05:19):
carried significant guilt over France's non intervention in the Spanish
Civil War. They realized after the fact that if the
French government or workers had supported the republic, if they
had transformed the popular Front movement into a revolutionary movement
and not a demand for paid vacations, the whole history
of the world would have been folded different. Wow.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
That's a sick burn. I know, I know that paid
vacation's jab. I mean he got to the point.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
To make things a little better for the workers until
both countries fell to fascism. You cowardly fucks.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Wow, that is an interesting sliding door moment.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Right wait, what's a sliding door moment.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
It's the idea of like, if one thing was different,
you'd like your whole reality would be different.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
It's also a delightful movie called Sliding Doors.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
No, I think a lot about I spent I spent
way too much of my time thinking about the spanishivil
war in general. But like, yeah, if if people had
prevented Spain from falling, like how much worse the world
would have gotten. But on the other hand, the other
thing that I spend way too much of my time
thinking about, and I could be wrong about this, but okay,
hear me out. M Franco tried to have a coup.

(06:41):
He tried to have a simple thing where he became
in charge. He didn't get it. Instead, he got three
years of war where he had to fight tooth and
nail across Spain. And because anti fascists threw down so hard,
Franco took over a country that was guttedually half his

(07:01):
army's fucking dead, all of his munitions are spent right
because of that, that is part of why he doesn't
enter World War two on the Fascist side is that
Spain isn't in a position to enter a war. They
just barely won one. Right. Oh, And now the argument
is whether or not if Spain had entered the war

(07:23):
on the side of the Nazis, whether or not the
Nazis would have won. And I don't know the answer
to it. But there's a version where some cops and
some anarchists who don't like each other working together saved
the fucking world by not letting him take Spain in
a coup and dragging it out into a war.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
I like this thesis.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
I do too, I'm behind it.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
Yeah. I like versions where of the things we do,
even when it looks like we lose, still matter, you know.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yeah, Well that's a good that's a very good thing
to hold onto right now in this moment in American history.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
I think about all the time when I'm reading history, too, right,
because there's so many things that like, like, eventually we
stop chattel slavery in this country, right, And it took
the deadliest war that America has ever participated in in
terms of American lives lost, and the things that led
up to it looked like failures. You had Nat Turner's rebellion,

(08:23):
you had John Brown's rebellion and a lot of other
rebellions besides that as the two off the top of
my head. And overall you're like, well, those people lost
and they died, right, but like they also sparked this
war and they helped en chattel slavery. I don't know. Yeah,
that's what I hold on too.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
That's actually very helpful, and I shall now be holding
onto it as well.

Speaker 1 (08:47):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
And also all of my personal failures are just laying
the groundwork for you know, a huge success later on.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
Exactly exactly. I mean I actually liked kind of genuinely
but right, because like the way you learn to do
things is by failing at it. Yeah, you know, if
you only ever succeed, it's stuff you are not trying
hard enough. So if you only succeed politically, you're not
asking for enough.

Speaker 2 (09:12):
That's interesting.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
And so yeah, he shows up and the French people,
because the average peasant in France there's a really good
chance they're a communist or a socialist of some stripe.
Right at this point in history, we tend to forget
that because of the Cold War and misunderstandings about what
communism and socialism are that have been ingrained to us
since we were little kids, you know. And so they're

(09:36):
not wild eyed radicals, but they're communists or socialists, and
they feel guilty. So they are like, okay, guy, we'll
follow your lead. And just to follow up on the
concentration camp that he left. On June twenty second, nineteen forty,
France formally surrendered to Nazi Germany, and you get the

(09:57):
start of what's called the VSHI government, the collaborate racist
government of France, where they're basically just run by the Nazis.
By nineteen forty two, that same camp, that infrastructure that
was built to hold refugees was now controlled by the fascists,
which is a thing with a lot of them out
in parallels. Right, When democrats build up state power and

(10:18):
the ability to do repression, and like clearly Biden did
a lot of stuff to expand border patrols and like
set of concentration camps on the border, all of that
is then inherited by fascists, right, So this camp is
inherited by fascists in nineteen forty two, and it became
what we understand as a Nazi concentration camp from which

(10:39):
Jews were shipped to Auschwitz. In August nineteen forty four,
it was liberated by the French Resistance. At this point
in the war, the USSR and Stalin are still allied
with the Nazis. The US hasn't entered the war yet,
and so the UK is kind of the only ones
still standing against fascism. WI must have just honestly, straight

(11:01):
up been one of the worst times to be alive
in terms of fighting despair. Like I really hate when
I got to hand it to the UK, but like
and even like Churchill's advisors and shit are like, yeah,
you got to surrender to the Nazis. We're just gonna lose,
you know that, right, England should just go fascist, We
should just give up, We should surrender, you know. And

(11:23):
then being like nah, but we can't though because they're
Nazis was crucial, Yeah, change the world. So it was
a hard time to be alive, just chaos. He is
reinventing what an asylum can be in the middle of
all of this fucking shit, just like like this is

(11:45):
the moment where he's like, let's try some radically new shit.

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Well maybe because everyone had bigger things to worry about,
nobody was like bothering with what he was up to.

Speaker 1 (11:55):
Oh my god, that's that's actually a decent point. Yeah,
and like everyone's like, well, we're all dead anyway, so
like all.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
Right, you know, yes, like whatever this guy's doing, who cares,
I gotta deal.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
With Yeah, yeah exactly. And so he actually, to the
end of his days, he really likes the term asylum
for these kinds of places. He likes it because it's
a place of refuge and he himself is a refugee. Ah.
He immediately pulls the bars off all the windows and
he starts letting patients go into town and trade things

(12:25):
and sell things and make friends and participate in the
social life of this small town. He also starts sending
postcards to his wife, to Helene, and specifically they're not
just postcards of like here's the pretty place I'm at,
but he's like left notes. It's like maps of the town,
and he's like he's basically being like, well, they're all

(12:45):
annotated so that, according to his daughter quote, so that
my mother could get to know the area, because he's like,
you're gonna be here, you know, and also you're gonna
be smuggled in, so like get to know the area.
Helene who is absolutely a badass in her own right.
She starts saving up money to pay a trafficker to

(13:05):
get her and her daughter north and is selling off
furniture on the black market. Under Franco, this is the
kind of thing I'm afraid of here. Under Franco, there's
no free travel around the country. So Helene managed to
get a maybe forged but I'm not sure, safe conduct
certificate to allow them to travel to Barcelona. So they're

(13:26):
not even leaving like Catalonia, but even within Catalonia. In
order to go from one town to the big city,
they got to get permission. Murray Rose was four and
a half years old. On the night that they left,
her grandmother cried and kissed her and said how she
would die without ever seeing her again. They made it

(13:46):
to Barcelona to stay with family, and Helene started sewing
and cooking for fascist generals in order to save money.
And then they travel at night in a train of
refugees through the mountains. I want to say that about
like ten of them or so, and they're led by
a smuggler, a trafficker. Murray Rose remembers the huge moon

(14:07):
over the hills and asks her mom does Papa see
the same moon, and you know, Mom's like, yeah, and
that was like kind of it was a hard time
as a four and a half year old across over
the mountains.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Impressive she remembers it, I.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
Know, and I think it's kind of one of those
things that's like a round where memory starts and then
you throw in like this. And also her letters, she
clearly she actually wrote a whole book about her family's history,
but it's only in French, and so I think she's
also probably drawing from her mother's memory as well when
she writes about this. But the trafficker betrayed them. He

(14:44):
led them through the mountains and down into a valley
and he's like, yeah, you're in France, give me your money,
and so it gives them, you know, all this money
they've been saving up for a fucking year or whatever,
and he takes off. They are still in Spain.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
That's such bullshit, I be. I know, what an evil, deeply,
deeply evil person.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
I know. Marie Rose Like in her letters talks about
how the plight of the modern refugee is nothing different
than what she experienced. And one of the things she
talks about is she's like the people who do this
smuggling and trafficking are just motivated by profit and like,
you know, right, But here's where it turns around, and
fucking humans rule. They're in this tiny Spanish probably Bosque,

(15:29):
but I'm not certain. They're in this tiny town, and
a shepherd from the little village is like, all right,
my nephew will take you for free. And so this
young man like throws the four year old over his
shoulders and they fucking take off through the mountains and
they hike all night. They camp in the ruins of

(15:49):
a church, and she wakes up in the morning. Marie
Rose wakes up in the morning to see snow for
the first time in her life.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
What a like metaphor that every thing's going to be
different now I know, like.

Speaker 1 (16:03):
This is the story. I want to see a movie
of the closest I've ever seen. There's a movie that
I didn't want to watch because of its title, and
then I finally watched that's actually really beautiful. This movie
called The Anarchist Wife, and it's either French or Spanish,
and it's about a refugee family from the Spanish Civil
War of anarchists, where the husband was the militant, but

(16:24):
the women, the woman is the protagonist and just as
much of a part of everything, just like happened to
not have been at the front or whatever. And it's
about their like time doing partisan resistance and sit It's
actually a really beautiful movie. But I was like, she
could be a fucking anarchist too. Fuck you. You know.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
It's provocative.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Yeah, it's true. It did provoke me, and it actually
is probably why I watched it in the end too.
And this whole account is worth reading. Honestly, her account
is one of the coolest things I've read for this show.
If you read French, she wrote a whole lass book.
But if you want to read these letters, there's four
of them. They're on Ben Platt's Mills blog. The link

(17:01):
to will be in the show notes and the sources.
And so they they go down into the valley this
time it's actually in France, and gendarmes catch them and
they're like, no, you're you're not French. You gotta go back.
But and Marie Rose actually believes the gendarmes were kind
of in on it. The gendarmes are like, look, we

(17:22):
got to take you back in the morning. Why don't
you stay at this hotel for a night and then
we'll take you back in the morning. And they go
in and the hotel worker is like this woman is like, nah,
fuck no, I'm gonna hide your asses, like you're not
getting deported, Like what the fuck?

Speaker 2 (17:38):
That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (17:40):
And so when the gendarmes come back the next morning
and then they're like, we're looking for the person, and
then the hotel workers like, I don't know, they must
have left in the middle of the night. Uh, they're
hidden in the attic, and they hide there for days,
maybe for weeks, because that's also worth knowing. This is
Nazi controlled territory, right, you know, like even though it's like, oh,

(18:02):
we made it out of Spain, frying pan, fire, et cetera.
You know, her husband's in the fire, so she's going
to the fire, you know, and so they hit there
for days, maybe weeks, in this attic. Meanwhile, Francesque it's
not safe for him to travel either because Nazis do
as Nazis do. There's no free travel within Nazi controlled
to France, but he sorts it out. The prefect of

(18:26):
Los Are, the province or whatever, fakes up a document
for him to travel, and so he takes it and
he heads off, and Francesque walks into that attic room
and the daughter walks up and is like hello, sir,
and like sticks out her hand, and she said, quote,
this is the first image, like the first memory I

(18:49):
have of my dad. I don't remember him before this meeting.
Obviously we saw each other intermittently during those four years
of war, but I have no recollection of it. I
knew as a photograph. Mother relates that as a child
I rushed into the legs of all the men with
glasses and a mustache, but it was never him. And

(19:10):
so on December sixth, nineteen forty, she met her dad
and got to grow up with him after all, and
they went to Saint Alban And you know what may
or may not have been on the carriage, like the
train walls, what advertisements. I don't know if they had
invented in train advertisements at that point, but if they hadn't,

(19:31):
they'd been really missing out on a lucrative opportunity for
people to hear about all kinds of things. Some of
the ads are even for good things, like going hiking
with your friends. That's literally Sometimes we get an ad
for go to the Woods and you know, only listen
to whatever. Use your own fucking judgment. You know how

(19:52):
advertising works. You live in this society. Here they are
and we're back, okay. And I was listening to this
other podcast that everyone should listen to called sixteenth Minute
of Fame with Jamie Loftus that's also a part of
the Cool Zone media network, and in it, she does

(20:12):
this thing where she's talking to everyone who's I'm completely
off script here, but everyone probably has figured that out.
She's talking to the people who do brand Twitter and
like brand TikTok, you know, and like how they like
like the horny dual lingo owl and shit like that.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
Right, didn't they kill him?

Speaker 1 (20:29):
Yeah? They killed him?

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
I learned that through through the podcast. I don't know
anything about pop culture, so I learned it through Jamie's podcast.
And they specifically have a word for anti advertising, which
is when you like, are like real cynical and you're like,
I hate capitalism, but here's some ads. I genuinely think
that's why they let me get away with it.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Well, when we were growing our YouTube channel, we would
do branded content, like we would just be like, hey, everyone,
we need money, and then it would be this wonderful
thing where our audience would be like get the bag. Yeah,
you exactly understood.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
I think it's fair to just bring people in on
it because it's like, look like we all have jobs,
you know, Like, yeah, my dog eats food for some reason,
and so do I, you know, and yeah, I like that.
I like just kind of being like just up front, like, look,
we're doing a thing, because I'm not like ashamed of
it either, right, It's just a thing, you know.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
And it's how advertisements have like been the backboat of
so much media. Yeah, for I mean that's why you
get TV, that's why you get a lot of newspapers,
like totally. So it's important.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yeah, until we live in a better society, and then
I can't even be like a literally last week's was
about how in the USSR, all art had to be
state sponsored. So if you weren't hired by the state
to make art, you like weren't allowed to write, you know,
and publish, and so it was all about how people
got around that by writing anyway. So never forget that

(22:09):
more than one thing can be bad at once.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
I'm looking forward to seeing what Trump does with the
Kennedy Center, and what beautiful shows he'll bring to the
stage they're programming is now just Trump's interests.

Speaker 1 (22:24):
I bet you. Every now and then there'll be like
someone playing Trump and he like won't be handsome enough,
and then we'll get arrested or something.

Speaker 2 (22:31):
Oh my god, that's so true.

Speaker 1 (22:33):
That whole thing where he freaked out about the painting
that wasn't good enough about him really just was like, yeah,
we got a dictators That's what this is.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
Well, I mean, it's really just so glaring how much
everything is fueled by his insecurity. Yeah, that he is
just like a true narcissist who cannot handle any sort
of attack at his being.

Speaker 1 (22:57):
Yeah. Absolutely, well, hopefully redacted and anyway, So Francesca and
Helene and Marie Rose make it to Saint alban and
in most texts, francesquets basically all the credit for doing everything,

(23:18):
but like some are actually aware that Helene was just
as vital to the functioning of the place, and that's
this I'm more likely to believe that. But also specifically,
the patients and the other doctors and the nurses and
the nuns all work together. And I know they work
together because they restructured the place to work together, and
so like the idea of big man of history ing

(23:40):
an anarchist who got rid of the hierarchy, or an
actual communist who doesn't believe in hierarchy who got rid
of the hierarchy. Within this place, it's just obscene. So
they're at the asylum and they're transforming it. They're drawing
on psychoanalysis, anti authoritarian communism, and surrealism or like they're
three like well Spring. He takes the bars off the window.

(24:02):
He's letting people on the go into town. He taught
the basics of therapy to villagers because he figured everyone
was gonna need it because they're all under occupation. I
mean he's not wrong, Yeah, no, totally. Together they developed geopsychiatry,
in which space itself is part of the therapy and

(24:23):
that the space itself needed to be healed. It wasn't
until the fifties that this gets more of the proper name.
But I'll get to in a second. A lot of
their stuff is stuff that we've seen elsewhere, usually later,
but actually fountain houses. Around the same time as this,
they try to break down the social hierarchy between doctor
and patient. They start like sleeping in the same place,
eating the same food. The nurses aren't wearing different uniforms,

(24:47):
and they become mutually involved in keeping the space clean
and functional, so people have a steak in the place working,
you know, being maintained and cleaned and things like that.
This strange madhouse is where the mood with the misleading name.
I told you that I was eventually gonna have a name.
The name of this style is institutional psychotherapy.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
That doesn't sound good, It sounds terrible.

Speaker 1 (25:13):
The idea, as best as I can understand, isn't institutionalized
psychotherapy right right, but rather the institution itself is sick
and it needs psychotherapy.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Oh now that's beautiful. Yeah, but again it's a language
use problem.

Speaker 1 (25:35):
Uh huh, and all that's just coming from French. And
then like they're actually literally going to inspire a lot
of the people who are sort of the continental theorist
model of philosophy, like to losing Gatari and Friends Phenon
and actually he's probably considered anti colonial, not continental, and
I think for co but I can more specifically tie
in to losing Gatari and Friends Phenon and to losing

(25:59):
Gatari are philosophers who specifically write in his continental theory style.
That's so fucking hard to understand, but it's sort of
meant to be that way, according to a Greek theory
had I asked about this once. I was like, why
the fuck is all this incomprehensible? And he was like, literally,
in France, they developed this idea that it like should
be poetic and kind of like make you uneasy and

(26:19):
make you really interrogate the text. And I'm like, I'm
a simple girl. I like, like like George Orwell's rules
for writing, which is like, right, as simply as you can,
you know, like don't dumb things down, but make things
as simple as you possibly can. Yeah, but that's not
necessarily the page they're on, so they probably didn't even
give a shit. That is a fucking incomprehensible name institutional psychotherapy.

(26:44):
To quote author Sasha Warren, the hospital was sick. It
had a social life, but it was impoverished and dehumanizing.
It claimed to offer shelter and refuge from the outside world,
but it took the form of a prison or even
a camp. If the assa was to become a real refuge,
then its role must be to disoccupy and disalienate the person,

(27:08):
not replace one alienation with another, Like that's reasonably clear.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
Yeah, one alienation, what is the the other? So one
alienation is like being removed from regular society and then
just replacing it with like being alienated within the institute.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
I think so. Yeah, I think it's about I mean,
they also present this idea that like society, modern capitalist
society is itself alienating, and that it is like breaking
down social bonds and things like that. But I think
that they I think they are talking about the specific
alienation of being you know, quote unquote mad or whatever. Yeah,

(27:48):
and then going into this place where you're now just
another alienation. One of the interesting things about reading about
all of this is I'm much more interested in the
part where they're going to smuggle guns to partisans and
less interested in the theory. But most of what is written,
the overwhelming majority of what is written and what I read,
is about the theory. And so I actually read a
lot about their ideas of alienation. But I kind of

(28:10):
didn't get at all.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
A simple girl, you had to save your storage for
the gun.

Speaker 1 (28:20):
Stuff, Yeah, exactly, And this was very specifically not an
anti institutional framework for care that is a movement within
certain psychiatric movements or anti psychiatric movements, right is to
be anti institutional but they believed deeply that place mattered.
During Francescue's time in Spain, he had tried to make

(28:42):
sure that each region had its own therapeutic methods that
fit their own culture and land and community. He tried
to engage the actual community in people's care. So the
institution had to become a place of actual care and
an actual home, and people needed to be disalienated from
the place that they were, like that they literally are,
right then, you know, And this approach was specifically practical

(29:07):
in the VC France world. Okay, so Nazi Germany had
like we'll call it hard genetics where they just kind
of killed everyone right, very famously, like if you're disabled
in some way, they're like, we're gonna fucking kill you.
We're horrible. Nazis Vichy France were soft eugenicists. Their policy,

(29:29):
which isn't better was to just leave institutionalize people to
starve or freeze to death by stopping taking care of them.

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Ah all right, yeah, sort of a passive approach to
your eugenics.

Speaker 1 (29:42):
Yeah, exactly. And their definition of madness at the time.
Madness is always socially constructed. But the definition of madness
that v she France is working on includes criminals, It
includes disabled people, it includes queer people. Forty thousand people
died of starvation and neglect or or murdered by vc
France through soft eugenics. No one, not one of the

(30:05):
patients died as san al bond during the occupation of
starvation or neglect because they had a collective process to
solve their immediate needs. The barrier between patient and doctor
and partisan hiding in the place all blurred together because
did I mention their hiding partisans. I will get to
that soon. Tuscaus wrote, quote, the human is a creature

(30:30):
that goes from one space to another. She cannot stay
all the time in the same place. That's to say
that the human is always a pilgrim, a creature who
goes elsewhere. And this idea of migration and change is
fundamental to his philosophy, and I fucking love it so
much that I shoehorned it in the script where it
didn't really fit. He wrote that the first right of

(30:53):
man is to wander. I also love that he's like both,
writing like the first right of man and then he's
using like sheep pronouns and this stuff. I get the
impression that he was doing the kind of thing that
people were doing back in the day, where like everything
is gendered and so they just kind of go back
and forth, you.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
Know, but there's a level of awareness there that's nice
to see.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Oh yeah, no, totally. Like I actually think that was
a very conscious thing that people did a lot, is
that they were like, he will do this, she will
do that, you know, as a way to again, not
a man who wrote the women out of his script
in his life, and they also developed this idea. Well,
they're not the only people who developed this idea comes
from a lot of different leftist political tendencies. They believe

(31:34):
in a permanent revolution and including like in the psychotherapy world,
that is to say, there is no perfect thing you'll reach.
You don't reach utopia. You build utopia and you are
constantly building it. The place the institution can always be improved,
We will always learn new methods, we will always be

(31:55):
trying to do better.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
I love that approach. Yeah, me too, because I think,
especially with a lot of people in their mental health journeys,
it's like, but why I aren't I all better yet?
And it's like you're never going to be all better. Yeah,
you're just taking care of yourself throughout your life.

Speaker 1 (32:11):
Yeah, totally. And I wonder if that even like helps
to be like just like the institution you live at
and are working kind of with as a patient, you know,
being like, look, you're never going to fully clean the floor,
but we want the floors to be clean, and you
want the floors to be clean too, And you're never
going to not have anger issues or whatever your thing is,

(32:32):
but we can work on it, you know exactly. They
set up a lot of occupational therapy things. Like one
of the things I love is that, like this story
and Fountain House and Bethel House, they all I kind
of hit upon really similar stuff and there's some conscious
communication happening, but like, well, now there is a lot
because I know that well, I know people work at
Fountain House and they're the people who told me about

(32:54):
this story, But I don't know that there was like
conscious communication happening when both things are happening same time, right,
They set up occupational therapy things. There's art and trades,
there's throwing parties and festivals, patients ran their own bar,
and I think it's not just for patients. I think
it's for villagers too, but I'm not one hundred percent
certain if you were playing cool people bingo. They also

(33:16):
had a newspaper, and I think they had a newspapers
for specifically only the people living at the place, so
it was a kind of internal when they could kind
of like talk shit and stuff. You know.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
I'd love if they had like a gossip column of
like B and B seeing of like who was eating
lunch with who?

Speaker 1 (33:33):
And I would not be surprised if they did.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
Like a page six of just the people.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Would I would not be surprised. I only found one
essay from one of these newspapers, and it was very
internal and it was like some nuns talking about like
how they felt about their position within the place. But
I would not be surprised at all if it was like,
can you believe that Sam is eating fucking beans? Again?
If there's Sam always eating beans? Know he fart?

Speaker 2 (34:01):
You know?

Speaker 1 (34:03):
They also and so in addition to just being like, hey,
you get to do arts and crafts, they politically set
it up so that the patients have power. They set
up a patient club which is a political body made
up of patients that had significant power over the asylum.
And this is a thing that I run across with
a lot of syndicalist ideas. Is this not just about
one thing I love? Is I love worker cooperatives where

(34:24):
workers own the store, whereas most like co op grocery
stores are owners cooperatives where the customers own the store.
I am currently distracted because a dog has appeared in
my field of vision on screen, Alison, what is that
dog's name?

Speaker 2 (34:40):
This is Phantom?

Speaker 1 (34:41):
Hi, Phantom. No one else can see Phantom because Phantom's invisible.
They're a phantom. But Phantom is very cute.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
He's a really nice guy.

Speaker 1 (34:52):
So so instead of just having a worker's cooperative or
an owner's cooperative, people tried to set up both. Like
a lot of all the ideas a syndiclus would have
would be like, look, if there's a school, it should
be run by the teachers and the students and the
parents of the students. It's everyone who has a stake
in how it happens. Right, So if there's a store,

(35:14):
the people who want to buy stuff from that store
and the people who work in the store should probably
be the people who make the decisions about the store collectively,
so they have the patients and the doctors have their
own sort of political and the caretakers or whatever have
their own political bodies to help control what's happening. Sos
Kaos wrote, quote, nothing should ever be obvious. Everything is

(35:39):
subject to discussion. Everybody must be consulted. Everybody can decide,
not just for the sake of democracy, but in order
to facilitate the progressive conquest of speech. To learn mutual respect,
the patients must be able to have a say on
the conditions of their stay and their care, their rights
of exchanges, expression and circulation, and so it's like part

(36:03):
of their therapy to be empowered.

Speaker 2 (36:07):
I think mutual respect is such an important backbone. Yeah,
of like all relationships.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Totally one of the things that like, okay, well, it's
even the next sentence. Conflict was a source of socialization.
So it's not like it's not like everyone just got along. Like,
these are people with serious mental illnesses and they're in
the middle of a war and they're starving, right, They
are in conflict with each other, and learning how to

(36:36):
de escalate and work through their conflict is part of
their therapy and part of survival definitely.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
I mean, that's like one of the main reasons why
like therapy can help is because you'll learn how to
navigate like issues with your therapist totally and to see
like you'll maybe like have an argument about something or
disagree about something, but then you learn how to like
repair it and share your thoughts and work through it,

(37:02):
and that like those skills you then can take out
of the therapy room.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
I remember once I was in this conflict mediation workshop
at an earth First camp, you know, so, like people
are tree sitting and stuff. We're getting together and we're
talking about, like you know, someone's presenting here's ideas about
conflict resolution and all of this stuff, and we're talking
to these skills and one a friend of mine worked
at a kindergarten basically and was like, oh, yeah, when

(37:27):
kids have conflict, they get really excited and they run
up to us and they're like, teacher, teacher, we're in
a conflict. I want to play with this toy, and
so does he, you know, and then they get really
excited to work through it together. And it was funny
because in that circle everyone was like, ah, yes, children
are very wise they are naturally very wise and they
know these things. And then my friend is like, not

(37:50):
really doesn't really talk a lot in things. It was
already a huge thing for them to bring up a
story at all. Afterwards, they came up to me and
they're like, no, we taught those kids that. Like it's
not that they're just magic creatures, you know, it's that
we can we can learn better ways of doing things.

(38:14):
But you know what is also a better way of No,
I got nothing. I got nothing. There's just a bunch
of ads that's gonna happen. Now, that's what's going to happen,
and we're back. Okay. So medical staff regularly performed manual labor,

(38:37):
including farming. They're also like trying to grow as much
food as possible, like everyone is right, And patients regularly
talk classes about the stuff they know. And then they
did the thing that is how I learned about them
in the first place, the thing I can find the
least information about. They helped the Partisans, the French resistance
of communists and anarchists and just not Nazis who would

(38:58):
one day liberate France, which means that you've got this
asylum a castle in the mountains where the patients are
making their own decisions alongside their caretakers anarchist communists and nuns.
And the decision that they make is that they're going
to hide and arm partisan gorillas on the third floor
of their castle. And I couldn't make that shit up.

(39:19):
It is too perfect to my interests.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
I loved so much that this is all happening in
a castle.

Speaker 1 (39:25):
I know, like, I want to write this, like, but
it already happened, you know, well, you.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
Could fictionalize it and make it into quite an epic story.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
It's true. I one of my like retire from everything
else goals is to just start writing like queer historical romance.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
Oh why do you have to wait to retire to
do that?

Speaker 1 (39:50):
Did podcasting take so much of my energy? And I
also have several books that I eventually I'll do it.
I just various excuses. Every author has various excuses. I'm
working on other books right now, and I dream of
one day being like, I'm gonna write about dark ages,
Ireland and gay people or something, you know, you know what?

Speaker 2 (40:05):
I think one day you will.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
I hope so too, assuming I make it through the
next several years of but you know what, it just
as a spoiler. Francesca's going to make it through the
next several years. He's going to make it through the occupation,
So there's hope for me. Literally, he fought in two
fucking wars against fascism, and one of them he lost.
In one of them he won, and that's not terrible.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
You know, these are pretty I mean pretty good stats.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
Yeah, and the bigger one is the one he won,
the one when we're playing for more chips. All of
the world beside Spain, which stayed fascist until the fucking
seventies eighties, whenever fucking Franco died. I sometimes know that
date and I don't currently. So the resistance is air
dropping them arms to distribute to gorillas. They care for

(40:52):
wounded soldiers. I think it's like the nuns are carrying
for wounded soldiers who show up. They distribute underground newspapers.
They forged documents to get soldiers and Jews into the
place as patients. So they were just taking in refugees
to be like, oh, yeah, you're like crazy.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
That's so smart.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Yeah. They even had a sick name for themselves, although
I won't pronounce it right. Unfortunately, they called themselves the
Society of Gevodon, based on a local legend which I
will now relate because it's really cool. This part is real,
and in the seventeen sixties, over the course of three years,

(41:33):
the Beast of Gevoudan killed at least one hundred people
in rural France. Like that actually happened.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
What kind of beast?

Speaker 1 (41:41):
That's the question. Oh, that's the history, doesn't know part.
It would rip out people's throats. Sometimes it would rip
off entire heads of people, which is not a thing
that most animals do. And it would do this in
the French countryside, in the area where the hospital was,
which was historically called Gueveoudon, it's called lose Air. I

(42:01):
think I forgot because it's not written in front of me.
The beast gets described by eyewitnesses as like a wolf,
but not a wolf, And there's a couple of reasons.
I like that one. There's this like cryptid in Appalachia
that is mostly an Internet thing, but I think it's
kind of based on a real thing, even though it's not. Whatever.
There's a thing called a not a deer, which is

(42:23):
like sometimes you see a deer and you're like that
deer is real weird and you're like, what the fuck
is going on? And then you're like, I don't think
that's a deer, you know, And it's the kind of
thing you see like late at night when you're like
walking around and there's a deer and you're like, wait,
that's not a deer, And I really like the not
a deer. So the fact that there's a not a.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Wolf, yeah, I like would love that there's just some
animals out and about that we just like have not seen.

Speaker 1 (42:47):
I know. Although the thing that makes me sadder than
anything is thinking about species going extinct that we never saw,
like under the ocean or whatever. How we have killed
fish that we've never seen before.

Speaker 2 (42:58):
Well, who knows what's going on in the ocean. To
be honest, that's true.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
They could be preparing to destroy us all. And you
know what, that's okay.

Speaker 2 (43:05):
Like truly like wild stuff could be going on in
its deep ocean.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
It's true, okay to quote History dot com about the
beast of Geradon or Gerdon quote. The beast was consistently
described by eyewitnesses as something other than a typical wolf.
It was as large as a calf for sometimes a horse.
Its coat was a reddish gray with a long, strong,

(43:30):
panther like tail. The head and legs were short haired
and the color of a deer. It had a black
stripe on its back and talons on its feet, and
so hunters combed the woods looking for this. The king
put out a fucking bounty on it. It was wounded
several times by a musket and then a bayonet, but

(43:51):
it escaped each time and continued to kill people.

Speaker 2 (43:54):
Do you think there's a chance it's a guy in
a suit.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
There is a small chance that it's a guy in
a suit. That is like one of the things that
people consider as a possibility. But most serial killers aren't
killing like a hundred people.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
You know, Well, that's not true. We have no idea.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
That's a good point. No, you're right.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
I think a lot of serial killers their numbers are
way higher than what we think they are, especially if
they're targeting like sex workers, where people don't no one
is paying enough attention.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
That's true, and especially like back in the day when
like imagine how much easier crime was before, like fucking
finger printing and shit, you know, and.

Speaker 2 (44:29):
Honestly, crime is still pretty easy. Like most people don't
most people get away with murder if you look at
like the murder solvery. Yeah, but we need more police.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
Yeah, yeah, totally, that'll solve it, even though they've been
proven in court to not have an obligation to help people.
So someone killed a huge wolf and everyone was like,
we did it, But then the attacks kept coming, so
it was clearly not that. A few years later folks
killed like a wolf, but not thing that had human
remains inside of it. It was probably a wolf, right,

(45:06):
or a bunch of wolves. It was almost certainly not
rabid because no humans during all this was we're getting rabies, right,
And a lot of people did survive the attacks.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
Oh and they all said the same description.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
More or less. This is like one of the things
that there's like a million fucking stories about, right, But like, overall,
the most likely thing is that it was a wolf
and just people were like, nah, I had like fucking
fangs or whatever, you know. Like, it's also possible that
it was a hyena or a lion, that especially a

(45:39):
not yet adult male lion that which would then have
a stripe down its back of hair instead of a
mane that had escaped from some menageree.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
Right, oh, interesting.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
Or people have said it might have been a guy
in a suit and the whole like beheaded thing kind
of ties into that a little bit, right, Or it
could have been a were wolf. I don't know, whatever,
Who am I to say it wasn't.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
My money is on wolf, but my money is on
guy in a suit. Yeah, maybe two guys in a suit,
based on how big it.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
Was, like like one of those horse costumes.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
That's okay. I'm going with that one. I'm going with
that one. So when they started working with partisans in
the same mountains, they called themselves the Society of Givedon
as a reference to the Beast of Givedon, because the
gorillas are now functioning as that, right, they're like hiding
and fucking taken out Nazis, And it's a society of

(46:41):
communists and nuns working together, and I love it and
about that fact, so Sciatus wrote, quote, I have two specialties,
turning communists into communists and nuns into nuns, because most
Catholics are not actually calf like. I have nothing against
being Catholic or communist. I am against those claiming to

(47:04):
be communists when they are radical socialists or public servants,
and against the nuns who believe they are nuns when
they are only officials of the church. Part of my
job has consisted of converting people into what they really are,
beyond their appearance, beyond what they believe they are and
their ideal self.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
I love the idea of converting someone into who they
really are. Yeah, that's such a succinct and like powerful
way to think about transformation.

Speaker 1 (47:32):
I know. And and in the context of being like,
oh you call yourself a communists, and why you standing
for Stalin what the fuck you know? Like like, oh
you call yourself a nun, Well, are you actually just
taking care of poor people or are you just like
doing whatever the church says? You know? I fucking love it. Yeah,
like challenge people to be the best selves, which mostly
I don't think about doing that to other people. I

(47:52):
try and think about that, like we should all just
try and do that with ourselves and encourage each other
to do it, you know, be our best selves.

Speaker 2 (47:59):
But why do you think he preferred communism to socialism?

Speaker 1 (48:04):
Okay, so I actually think in this sense when he
says I'm turning communist into communists, I think that he's
not identifying as a communist here in the same way
that he's not catholic. I actually think this is actually
evidence in my he's in an archosyndicalist theory. But in
this particular context, everyone's going to use these words differently

(48:25):
at different times, right. But imagine a three sided leftist triangle,
and you have socialism and communism and anarchism. Now, theoretically,
socialism is a broader umbrella about who owns the means
of production and under that that has a lot of
different things that that could be. But generally speaking, when
people are using it around this time in the twentieth century,

(48:47):
they're sort of saying democratic socialism. They're saying something that
doesn't really exist in the US, but is a very
common European thing of being kind of left of center,
being like Bernieish right. And that's not a bad thing
to be, but it is a distinct thing from the
far left, which wouldn't be the socialist but would instead
be the communists and the anarchists. To make things even

(49:09):
more confusing, communism theoretically means a stateless society, it actually
means anarchism. But the people who call themselves communists, especially
in the middle of the twentieth century are referring to
the Communist Party and therefore Soviet control and capital see
communism overall. And so if someone is a radical leftist

(49:31):
and a communist at this point, instead of calling themselves
a socialist, it means that they are like a revolutionary.
They want to seize the means of production. Why are
as a socialist probably wants to vote in socialists into power.
And then a syndicalist, an anarcho syndicalist, wants trade unions
to build power and then slowly make the state obsolete.

(49:54):
That's my rough overview. Yeah, and what.

Speaker 2 (49:59):
Do you think, So you think he identified as that
last one that you said that thing I could never pronounce.

Speaker 1 (50:05):
I can't tell because his parents were that, okay, and
that was a huge part of the Spanish movement. But
he was also a Marxist, and Marxism was slightly different.
He was probably what we would call now a like
small SA communist. He was probably didn't believe in the
state or like USSR and Stalin and shit. I've read

(50:28):
some things that called him in an arcosyndicalist, and I've
read some things that called him an anti Stalin communist,
But in the end, those are not wildly disparate positions.
They want a revolutionarily different society in which the means
of production are entirely owned by the workers and also
the people who make use of the products of them

(50:49):
or whatever.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
Right, Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
Yeah, no, that was a useful question. It's the kind
of thing It took me like twenty years of being
political before I could actually articulate that, because it's so messy,
because it's confusing. Yeah, twenty years later or earlier, people
would have said a completely different thing.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
And also there's such charge terms, so people bring a
lot of bias to them without necessarily understanding what they mean.

Speaker 1 (51:15):
Yeah, to all of them. Yeah, it's and it's hard
because like, in some ways I think that knowing his
position is useful because it's useful to see like lineages
and like where things come from and where they're going.
But it's so murky, and so I think early at
the end of the day being like, well, he was
like a radical, absolutely, but he also was just like

(51:36):
trying to be good to everyone all the time. Yeah,
you know, and like the fact that he also doesn't
have a problem with the Catholics a lot of Communists,
and anarch has had problems with the Catholics and still
do or any Christians or religion. A lot of them
are like militantly atheists, especially from Spain. So like he's
clearly not obsessed with like I must fit this label,
you know.

Speaker 2 (51:55):
Yeah, And that's probably one of the reasons that he
was such a force for good.

Speaker 1 (52:00):
I think so too. I always like to imagine that
anarchism wants to not can hold itself constrained, because it's
theoretically the one that's about free thinking, but it absolutely
sometimes just ends up just another ideology or whatever. So
by hanging out with all these folks, all these people

(52:21):
hanging out together, the nuns themselves and their order become
less and less hierarchical as time goes on. They write
essays in this that I was saying. I read an
essay that was in the newspaper that they circulated only
for themselves. They wrote an essay about how they hated
being called guards and they were not guards, and they
did not were not armed masculine forces of enforcement, you know,

(52:42):
they were insulted to be called guards. And the Mother
Superior started off as one of Francescu's fiercest critics and
then wound up one of his strongest allies. Makes me
really happy.

Speaker 2 (52:54):
I mean, being able to change your mind is I
think a sign of great intelligence.

Speaker 1 (53:01):
I agree. Part of their daily struggle, though, during the
occupation Vichy France, is just to survive. There's no money
in the Nazi budget for feeding mental patients. Because they
know how to self organize. They refuse to be isolated
in their castle, and so they survived. They taught classes
on mushroom foraging and would go out and forage all

(53:23):
the time. The nuns in particular actually had really extensive
knowledge of herbalism thanks to the work of the previous
director's wife, Germaine Beauvais, who taught them all medicinal herbs
and not just She's not just like an herb lady,
although that's a perfectly fine thing to be. Her nineteen
forty one medical thesis because she also is anyway whatever.

(53:45):
Her thesis was called on the organization of an insulin
therapy service and narcotherapy in a rural hospital.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (53:54):
So like, yeah, they do believe in medicine, you know.

Speaker 2 (53:57):
Yeah, there's hard science there.

Speaker 1 (53:59):
Yeah, and they have one of the better insulin administration
regimes available in France as best as I can tell,
because she's stuck around and kept working there during the occupation.
People there participated in the local economy of the town.
The patients and the doctors and even the accountants would
leave the asylum and go work in exchange for food
like butter and turnips were often some of the only

(54:22):
food they could get. And while there was no ration
card for mental patients, there were. I promised to bring
tuberculosis into this story. There were ration cards for people
with tuberculosis because France was going to take care of
people with TB, but not people with mental illness.

Speaker 2 (54:40):
Why because you can survive TB and then become part
of the workforce. Again.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
Yeah, maybe it's like not a character flaw in a
eugenicist way or something like. Okay, And so in the
first positive story about TV, I think I've done this
whole time. They started diagnosing everyone with TV in order
to get ration cards to share all the.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
And you get TV.

Speaker 1 (55:04):
Yeah, totally. The place became a sort of artist colony
during the war. It just keeps getting cooler.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
This is amazing.

Speaker 1 (55:14):
Various anti fascists of all stripes would take refuge there,
Picasso visited the place. It's as important in the history
of outsider art as it is in psychotherapy. Patients there
wrote a ton of poetry, and they painted, and they
made sculptures, and they dresses and all of this stuff, right,
And sometimes they would open up the courtyard so that villagers,

(55:36):
as they would walk through, could buy sculptures and art
for like cigarettes or a few cents, and artists and
people would come like kind of like study there and
like learn from the outsider artists or whatever. But there's
actually some tension around this. Some people are into what's
called art brew or brutes or something. It's the French
version of outsider art and it means raw art, right, okay,

(56:00):
And this is this new art movement, right, and there
are people who into that, who are into that, who
were into the art that the patients made, but they're
into it kind of exploitatively some of them. It's like
the patients aren't seen seriously as artists, but instead as outsiders,
like how one might view a child, although perhaps we
shouldn't view children's art this way either. Just Ka has

(56:22):
fought hard against this way of seeing the art that
was made by people living at the asylum. He was like,
don't fucking exploit people. They are like like art is
good and they are artists. They're not Wow, even the
crazy person made a crazy sculpture or whatever the fuck
you know, and the art's really cool. There's like, literally,
if you read about this place, you're going to find again,

(56:44):
not enough about hiding partisans Margaret's interest, but instead lots
about an art movement and a psychotherapy movement, which are
both actually perfectly valid. And I would rather do art
than get shot at. So I guess what am I
talking about. I'm focusing on Toscatas because I think he's
and because that's where most of the information is is
about him. But the whole point, and I think he

(57:05):
would agree, is that it's not about him and what
he did, but what the institution as a living entity did.
To quote Johanna Masso in pair a Practice magazine quote,
if Sano Bond's legacy still appears to us as political,
it is because it carries another transmission besides the big
name guys, that the practices of women psychiatrists and nurses

(57:28):
who have mostly disappeared from history of the politics of care.
So like, there's so many unnamed women in this story,
and I've tried to name the women where I can, right,
but there's so many more. After the war, they kept going.
The place is still there today. It's named after Francois Toscadas,

(57:48):
and he himself, after the war, wrote a nineteen forty
eight doctoral thesis called the Psychopathology of Lived Experience, which
is such a like sick name to be like, Yamaya,
what do I bring to this fucking thesis? Well, I
ran psychotherapy for an entire fucking country's army, and then
like in a concentration camp, and then during a war

(58:11):
in another country. He lived under three occupations, Stalinist, Francoist,
and German. He referred to the idea of getting mentally
healthy as deoccupying your mind, and so this is all
political to him always. In the nineteen fifties he and
Helene shot a number of films at the hospital, and

(58:32):
this is where a lot of the like actual images
of like we know that women were involved because there's
some fucking video of them, you know. In nineteen fifty three,
some folks opened up a second asylum in France, operated
in under the same lines. This to me is mostly
famous because a philosopher named Felix Guatari worked there for
a long time, mostly known as Guatari of deluzing Gwatari fame,

(58:54):
and when I say fame, I mean to people who
like esoteric leftist philosophy. I named banned nomadic war machine
after a concept that they have about the nature of
states and conflict, because I'm a normal person can be
trusted to do normal things. Maybe the most famous person
influenced by their methods is a guy named Franz Fanon.
He is a future friend of the POD. I hope

(59:16):
he is one of the most important, if not the
kind of cornerstone decolonial philosophers. His book The Wretched of
the Earth is like one of the most important books
and like just literally like, let's study the philosophy of
how people get fucking free from colonization. He was now Jerian.
He took the institutional psychotherapy framework about deoccupation and extended

(59:40):
it to decolonization, and he did his medical residency in
the early nineteen fifties as Saint Alban. He went back
to Algeria and he improved upon the work of Sant Alban.
In case I don't get to do a whole thing
about him soon. I'm just going to cover it real quick.
He set up a day clinic so that patients could
keep living with their families, and, like Toskietas recommended, he

(01:00:02):
wanted to treat people close to where their traumas had happened.
To quote author Gregory Evan Ducas he quote, organized trips
where nurses could accompany patients and observe how they behaved
in actual social situations. He encouraged nurses to socialize and
dine with the patients, something prohibited beforehand. His most radical

(01:00:22):
innovation was a suggestion that social movements could facilitate collective transference.
And I don't entirely know what transference means in this
case because it's a weird philosophy thing, but I think
means getting better.

Speaker 2 (01:00:35):
Well transference in psychology.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Oh okay, yeah, no, tell me.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
Transference in psychology means like associating, Like if you were
my therapist, I would like transfer my feelings about my
mother onto you. So it's like transferring your feelings about
something onto something else. But I don't understand exactly what
it would mean in that context.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
So in this context, it's like the the social movement
allows not just an individual, but a collective of people
to do that same transference. The social movement is therefore
the therapy for the oppressed people.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
But transference isn't necessarily like healing, right, It's more just
like something that occurs during therapy.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
But is it part of getting better? Is like I
don't know. Okay, maybe I'm stretching here. I'm still hold
by my read of it, but I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
It's more like something that like the therapist would need
to be aware of, right, because like you would be
like I'm not your mother, right, right, or like aware
that like maybe the client is reacting to you because
of this transference that is happening, and so being aware
of that and navigating that.

Speaker 1 (01:01:45):
Okay, well then I think we don't totally know what
that part means. And if you are listening and you're
a big Phenonen head, you probably do know what it means.
But let us know. Yeah, and so yeah, the asylum
in France kept going, and also kept going has been
a lot of the leftist stuff that he participates in,

(01:02:07):
inn archosyndicalism in arc of communism, not being a Stalinist
but still caring about society, and so has people fighting
for refugees, and the mentally ill and the neurodivergent. And
one final note, I didn't nowhere else to stick it in,
but I'm gonna have it because it's a quote I like. Well, Okay,
so he stays in France the rest of his life, tosquiatus.

(01:02:28):
So he left the asylum in nineteen sixty two. He
died in nineteen ninety four, and he did this awesome
thing where he figured out how to defend his bad French.
He wrote in the late nineteen eighties quote, I always
had a theory a psychiatrist, to be a good psychiatrist
must be a foreigner, or appear to be a foreigner.
So it's not coquetry on my part to speak French

(01:02:50):
so badly. The patient or even a normal guy must
make an effort to understand me. They are obliged to
translate and to take an active position toward me. And
I like that because, like, I'm reading about him through translation,
and I'm running it through my own experiences and my

(01:03:11):
own background and my own context of reading about the
social movements that he's part of. And I like that.
I have to and you listeners are doing the same thing.
With different set of assumptions about all of these things.
And I like that he likes that. I like that
he knows that. It's like we are now an active
part of his story because we're trying to fucking figure.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
It out, and it makes you pay more attention.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
Yeah, yeah, No, I like I spent way too much
time trying to figure out exactly how mean identified. Although
that's my own hang up, uh, but I like, usually
I do this thing and then I'm like, yeah, but
I need did this thing. He might have done some
bad things, but like, man, I don't know about him
and that love story of where he he fucking loved

(01:03:57):
his family, which is a low bar, but a bar
A lot of fucking people who claim to be good
people don't fucking meet and like getting forged passes to
go meet his fucking daughter in the attic where she's hiding,
and like, I don't know, I'm just like warm and
fuzzy on that whole fucking place.

Speaker 2 (01:04:16):
I think it's okay to just sink into that, like
it's yeah, like you know, some people really live by
their values, and I think, like you said earlier, he did.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
Yeah. Yeah, there's another thing I didn't even like because
I again, I was reading a lot of stuff that
was very anecdotal and a very very translated. Uh. And
one of those there's one story about him where near
the end of his life, someone's dying and they're like, oh,
go get the Spaniard, which is what they would call

(01:04:45):
him in the town. Go get the Spaniard. I think,
I think they need someone to come and like therapies
the dying because he's maybe not religious, he doesn't need
a priest or something, right, go get the Spaniard because
he won't charge you. So he was just like, yeah,
I take care of people. That's what we've fucking do.
And like, I mean, obviously everyone needs a job, and shit,
it's not wrong to get paid for something, but like,

(01:05:06):
poor person's dying, do you know how to help the dine?
You fucking go do it?

Speaker 2 (01:05:11):
Fuck yeah, And that's your reputation, right, A reputation is
that's who people go to in those moments.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
Yeah, there was a story. I think a listener on
this show told me, but I can't remember. There's a
story about this, like Quaker in Pennsylvania or something, I
don't know, and someone comes up and is like, hey,
are you a Christian and he's like, I don't know,
go ask my neighbor.

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
Oh, I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:05:37):
And like, yeah, whatever your best self is. Can people
know that you are trying to do that? You know,
and we'll all fail.

Speaker 2 (01:05:47):
But yeah, I mean I think that's the biggest disconnect
that's happening in our country right now is how many
people think they're good Christians then are voting to like
take away rights and punish people like all this horrible stuff.
And I do wonder, like how do they just not
think about it?

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
I mean it's like it's this is one of those
words that's just like like any of the ideological words
that I was describing. There's like two thousand years of
different shit getting called Christian, you know, and like the
core text isn't internally consistent. I'll phrase it that way,
and like, yeah, you got Quakers who are like one
of the main backbones of the abolitionist movement. You've got

(01:06:29):
like it's just all over the place. You have people
doing horrible things in the name of ideology or religion
and amazing things in the name of ideology and religion,
and like often under the same names. But like, I
don't know, Yeah, the Catholic national the Christian nationalism things, right,
Catholic nationalism is Franco Spain Christian nationalism, which is more

(01:06:50):
Protestant that we're dealing with now, I don't it's a
fucking nightmare.

Speaker 2 (01:06:55):
I've just been shocked, you know, as a Jewish person,
how people are to me. It is so fundamentally Unjewish
to wish to wipe out the population of people.

Speaker 1 (01:07:08):
Yeah, like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
That's wild to me, and I'm having a really hard
time with it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
Yeah, totally. I don't fucking envy you dealing with that
and like getting your fucking name invoked as this like
hapless victim that needs Christian nationalists to fucking wipe people out.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Or like anti Semitism being used as like this magical
word to allow for any kind of behavior. Yeah, in retaliation, right,
it's wild.

Speaker 1 (01:07:40):
Yeah, well on that note, but you know, we need more.

Speaker 2 (01:07:48):
But there are good people even in the worst of times.
And so who knows in like seventy years who people
will be talking about in this moment of time.

Speaker 1 (01:07:57):
Yeah, yeah, no, good point. It's also always important to
remember that like the Great Man theory of history is nonsense,
and it's people who are just people just doing things
and being like, I think we can get something done,
and we are making history right now, Like I cover
you know, social movements that change the world that started

(01:08:20):
with like five people being like what if we don't
let everyone we know diab ades or you know, whatever
the thing is. Yeah, the things that we do have
actual impact. We're part of history right now. But if
you want to step outside of history and read fiction,
which it's honestly sometimes a relaxing and necessary balm for

(01:08:43):
your brain, uh many book wrecks.

Speaker 2 (01:08:49):
Yes, I can promise that. My new roalm com novel
that came out yesterday when you're listening to this is
called Save the Date, and I think it's some escapist
fun while still being you know, grounded and realistic characters
and getting to have a lot of like funny family
dynamics along with the love stories.

Speaker 1 (01:09:08):
I sort of love having you on as like a
rom com writer, as I'm then like, let me tell
you about this like horrible war and these like radical
like you know, political folks. But I like how these
to me don't seem like well they're disparate and that
they're not the same thing. But I really like thinking
about how it's just like, well, it's all just people
and it's not Yeah, you know, like we all contain multitudes.

Speaker 2 (01:09:32):
And my other work is all psychology based.

Speaker 1 (01:09:36):
That's true. So yeah, yeah, you're.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
Catching me on a day where I'm leading with rom
com writer, but other times.

Speaker 1 (01:09:41):
Yeah, that is why I have you on for mental
health ones. I was like, I've been have had the
story in my back pocket for a minute and ever
since doing Fountain House in Bethel House. And then I
was like, oh, Allison's on the schedule, this is the
one we're doing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
And then in save the Date, she's she's a couple therapists,
So I get to insert a lot of my thoughts
on psychology as well.

Speaker 1 (01:10:01):
Hell yeah, well remember to save the date, which was yesterday,
and pick up the book and uh what else? Get
together with your friends and make plans. That's my pitch
and plug is that think about contingencies and think about

(01:10:21):
how you're going to help people, and think about how
you're going to be your best self when bad things happen,
because people are going to be reading about what you're
doing right now seventy years from now.

Speaker 2 (01:10:30):
You can't control everything, but you can keep a hold
of your humanity.

Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
Yeah, all right, see y'all next week.

Speaker 2 (01:10:44):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
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