Ergotherapy, Vagabondage, and Instituent Care

In his revolutionary psychiatric practice, Francesc Tosquelles insists that institutions cannot care unless everyone cares for the institution. In the process of instituting, instituent care erodes the walls of the institution, spreads to the surroundings and allows itself to be transversally permeated. As a form of vagabondage, it remains unfamiliar and strange and allies itself with resistance. One of the many inspirations for these practices came from the reformatory psychiatric ergotherapy of Hermann Simon, director of the psychiatric hospital in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, who increasingly advocated biologistic and social Darwinist positions at the end of the 1920s. Tosquelles hijacked Simon’s reformist practices to make revolutionary use of them.