[Automatic translation from Catalan]:
A portrait of the lecturers, when they are such popular and distinguished professionals, and when the video and presentations published in the monograph included in the issue magazine number 50 detail so many personal anecdotes and accounts of knowledge and interaction with the honoured Dr. Francesc Tosquelles, is a rather banal exercise, but we will do so equally to try to convey the enthusiasm and the excitement, and some anecdotes, with which the lecturers and the Association board prepared this memorable psychoanalysis conference dedicated to the work of Dr. Francesc Tosquelles and his legacy.
The first challenge facing the Association Board was the choice of lecturers. We went on to discuss the various issues that we wanted to deal with on the conference and to choose who we thought was the best professional to develop each topic.
But once we had the list of names, we had to contact them and agree on the subject to be developed, and that was another matter.
All the lecturers are excellent professionals, but some are a little more eccentric, some a little more vehement, some a little more formal, and so we could go on, a reflection of life in general. With all our affection!
Belén, the severe Navarrese that enjoys investigating why she was taken out to dance in her first professional encounter with the honouree, without having yet reached a definitive conclusion, is both professional and little cocky. At first she was very pleased about the event and told us that she was very much looking forward but was not able to gloss the master. Her in-depth knowledge of the professional practice of honouree and of whether or not his work was relevant to our mental health institutions were more than sufficient merits for her participation. Polite and punctual, she sent us a photograph dressed formally in a luxurious giant mirror room. “I have not dressed formally to appear in the photo” she was justified, it is a photo taken at the Vienna opera, one afternoon after visiting Freud’s studio. Between teachers we move!
Fernando, always solicited, immediately said yes. Between digressions about his narcissistic desire to speak in public about Tosquelles and his conviction that Tosquelles’s work deserves to be widely publicised, he advanced the plot of his speech around the need to recognise each other’s uniqueness for something works, a very Tosquelianan thesis. He always leaves the bureaucratic procedures at last, while he would rather enter into the discourse core. His profile picture shows us a Fernando in his studio among books, with smiling pose as he tells us another anecdote from his friend and teacher.
To deal with Jacques is a little surreal, from the anecdote he sent to us by the paper to publish in a hand-cuffed and French-language written, unintelligible by the letter, small-scale medical style from before the computers, to the surprise we had when we asked for a photograph to be included in his profile and, after commenting to us, “I have one at 4 or 5 years old, with ridiculous underpants. It seems to me that it is not proper!”, he send us two photos, one of him as a child from the back and in the arms of an adult who is not seen with the face and face of him as a child reflected in a mirror, the other of him having the bare torso emerging from a giant mollusc shell. It not to be missed! 😉. Being the son of a great public personality is usually difficult, and talking about your own father, even obscene (in the words of Jacques himself). Between travels to Cuba, we outlined the development of his speech about how the subject that suffers is expressed. A delight.
Pere, the meticulous and self-absorbed professional who already enjoys a deservedly recent retirement and is now engaged in collecting the history of the evolution of mental health institutions, was the right person to describe the evolution of Community psychotherapy and its influence on our institutions and the medical group in general, focusing on segregated childhood. A great profusion of history and concepts that have required a lot of scissors to adapt to the time and space available. We ask him for a photo and he send it to us immediately, where he looks relaxed in the garden of one of the institutions where he have been working. All professional, not personal, until it deals with the epistemological boundary and the idiatrogeny, when he offers his mea culpa for not having been able to contribute more to restricting the reproduction of the defensive models of the institutions themselves, an unfinished piece of work that he is now claiming for it from another area.
Miquel, looks back on that summer afternoon of 1983 when he first contacted the honouree. Anyone would have thought that his profile picture would also be in a bathing suit to commemorate the date; instead, he wears an alpaca suit and a solemn pose in the atrium of what appears to be his office. The preparation of the speech was constructed from literary texts by ferrater and also by weiss, improvising in the act itself. Without pedantry, he launches a “and those who know Freud’s text know what I’m talking about”. Perhaps his Lacanian affiliation leads him to praise the first approximation of the honouree to Lacan’s thesis in 1932, which by then played a transformative role. The disquieting desire, these small bombs that the honouree spoke of, and being “so foreign to the outside as in his own house”, weave the plot of a speech that eventually had to be declaimed in the dark, on account of a light outage on the entire block where the act was held.
