In this interview the Paris-based film maker and art brut collector, Bruno Decharme, talks about his passion for collecting works of art. He speaks poetically of his fascination for the works of psychotic patients and of his attempts as a director to capture the essence of outsider artists in his documentaries. He compares his collection to a creation that tries to provide answers but instead raises new questions.
This article explains how packing as a cure affects the subject and her body in a special therapeutic way. The encounter with a young psychotic woman and her suffering, written all over her body, led us to initiate this treatment which takes the body as a privileged route of access for therapy. Packing as a cure is an attempt to create a corporeal development with the aim of reconstructing a psychic envelope and as such providing access to a history that is singular. We will demonstrate how this cure is a process of permanent dialogue with the collective. Using clinical material we will illustrate how the platform of packing and theatre gives this woman the opportunity to become the author of her own personal story.
Reflecting on the past seventeen years, the author describes the vicissitudes of the notions of transference and constellation in the history of La Traversière. He does so on the basis of a consideration of the history of psychoanalytical theory on the work, via transference, with psychotic patients. In this sense, his story forms a plea for the recreation and safeguarding of the conditions under which we can work with dissociated transference by means of the constellation meeting, as introduced by Tosquelles in Institutional Psychotherapy.
This article is a reflection on institutional work with psychotic people. The myth of Sisyphus serves as a metaphor for the difficulties and possibilities one encounters in this work: on the one hand, the never-ending nature of the work, the laborious progress, the alienating dynamics of the institution; and on the other, the movement, the chances to meet one another. The movement of institutional psychotherapy offers tools for constant reinvention and endurance in this work. Clinical examples illustrate how this thinking tries to realise itself in the daily practice of the institution.
This essay tracks the experiences of an excited psychotic woman who moves from a closed crisis unit to an open treatment unit. Initially the move has devastating consequences and she falls apart. After only a couple of days she is transferred back to the closed unit in a hypo-manic, completely excited, state. This is the beginning of a process involving both units. We decide to move her gradually: a couple of hours a day in the closed unit and a couple of hours a day in the open one. At first the only idea we have is to organise regular meetings between the teams. Very soon the idea develops to work more with her transference onto objects and places rather than with her transference onto members of the team. Work with a photo album quickly reduces her excitation. In a second stage we try to explain what went wrong with her first transfer and what worked with the second attempt. To this end we use the conceptual apparatus of Institutional Psychotherapy, the notion of contact (Szondi/Schotte), and Winnicott’s ideas with regard to the transitional object and the continuity of being.