Living through the End of the World (as We Know It)

The question of catastrophic experience – an experience of ‘the end of the world’ – constitutes the subject of Tosquelles’s medical thesis Le vécu de la fin du monde dans la folie, submitted and defended in 1948. In the preface to its delayed publication in 1986, Tosquelles leaves no doubt that, while the thesis presented itself as a clinical account of such experiences ‘in madness’, he had written it under the impression of a madness inseparable from the dictates of normality: the madness of the Spanish Civil War and of World War II, which had indeed ended the worlds and lives of so many. Against this backdrop, I would firstly like to examine the intertwinement of clinical, philosophical and sociopolitical analyses in Tosquelles’s thesis and its implications for what would come to be termed institutional psychotherapy or institutional analysis. Secondly, I would like to consider the existential motif of an experienced ‘end of the world’ with a view to the desiring surges traversing it, but also to a radical multiplicity of experiences that challenges assumptions about the ‘we’ underpinning what is commonly perceived as a world.