Psychiatry and Social Transformation in Josep Solanes

Abstract

The article explores the concept of psychiatry as a discipline that underpinned the work of Catalan republican exile Josep Solanes (1909-1991) over six decades of professional activity. In a constant dialogue with philosophy, anthropology, and literature, Solanes theorized and put into clinical practice a psychiatry that aspired to cure mental pathologies and, in doing that, transform society. The article traces his active commitment in the 1920s and 1930s to the artistic, political, and medical avant-gardes that advocated a post-bourgeois Catalonia and Spain; his revolutionary vision of a new psychiatry for a new man and society during the Spanish civil war; his pioneering work in the 1940s, already in exile in France, on exile as a mental pathology; in Venezuela from the 1950s onwards, the development of an emancipatory psychiatry through the conception of occupational therapy as an opportunity for the healing of the psychiatric institution itself. The article closes by showing how, in the last stage of Solanes’ career, focused on the critique of technological rationality, exile emerges as a privileged space of enunciation and –as shown in his posthumous work Los nombres del exilio (1993)– it is the exile, as a subject freed from their national bonds, who can aspire to becoming disalienated