Robert Hurley on François Pain, in conversation with Perwana Nazif, on Sunday, January 5th, 2025.

The second installment of the LA PRIME reading series hosted by Rosie Stockton and Chloe Watlington at Apogee's offices in the Westin Bonaventure. 

Robert Hurley is the translator for the Tosquelles: Curar las Instituciones by Joana Masó. His credits include translating the work of French philosophers Michael Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Clastres, and Georges Bataille.

Perwana Nazif is the Art Director at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a contributing editor at Parapraxis. 

François Tosquelles (1912-1994) was a Catalan psychiatrist who founded “institutional psychotherapy” at the Saint-Alban hospital in Lozère in the wake of the Spanish Civil War.  Tosquelles de-pathologized madness and experimented with communist and Freudian frameworks to “cure” not only the patient, but the institution of the hospital. He had an anarchist approach to psychotherapy and invented a technique called deconnaitrie, loosely translated to fucking around, that allowed the analyst and analysand to play with comprehensibility. Tosquelles was also a filmmaker. Countless photographs show him peering out from behind his super-8 camera. He collaborated on films with Mario Ruspoli, notably Captive Feast (1962), a short documentary about the patient’s summertime party. His comrades at Saint Alban included Franz Fanon and countless other surrealists and psychotics in exile from facism. Together their work encouraged all analysts to treat the transformation of the asylum and the work of revolution as one in the same.