This article develops Francesc Tosquelles thesis and it is linked to his return to Institut Pere Mata. He returns all scientific knowledge acquired before 1939 in Reus, Catalonia and Spain, applied and developed later in his professional stage at the Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole hospital, known finally as “institutional psychotherapy”.
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[Automatic translation from Catalan]:
It is known to everyone that, from 1968, with the incorporation of Francesc Toquelles at the head of the management teams of the Pere Mata Institute, the Reus psychiatry benefited from the field of knowledge that the new consultant and coordinator contributed as a result of the experience acquired at the mental hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole and other French mental health institutions. The truth is, however, that Tosquelles had brought to French health many reflections, practices, techniques and proposals that he had learned at the Pere Mata Institute, in Reus, in Catalonia, and in the mental health care centers where he had acted during the Spanish Civil War. We wonder, today, whether this extraordinary baggage did not make a round trip.
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If we look at the conditions under which Tosquelles’s thought has returned to our country, we will see that, since 1968, his presence in the medical management team of the Pere Mata Institute resulted in the reception in our community of theories and therapeutics—the so-called “institutional psychotherapy”—that he had gestated for the thirty years he was absent.It should be borne in mind, however, that in the shaping of Tusquellian praxis, doctrine and philosophy not everything is of French origin. Despite his youth, Tosquelles was already a grown man when in 1939, fleeing Franco, he crossed the Pyrenees. Not only he was an expert psychiatrist, trained alongside the best masters, who continually updated his knowledge with access to the most advanced theories, but he was a seasoned man, prepared for the most extreme difficulties, due to his experience on the war front. […]
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