The Margaret Lock Seminar
In honour of her 85th birthday in February 2021, the Department of Social Studies of Medicine is naming an annual departmental seminar after medical anthropologist Margaret Lock, one of the founding faculty members of the department. The Margaret Lock Seminar will showcase work in medical anthropology and closely related fields, focusing on scholars who engage topics in deep and committed ways, who offer nuanced analyses in global perspective, reflecting the spirit and richness of Professor Lock’s scholarship. SSoM faculty will collaborate with medical anthropologists in the Department of Anthropology to identify and invite speakers. The yearly Margaret Lock Seminar will also be an occasion to announce the student winner of the Margaret Lock Prize. The Margaret Lock Seminar will contribute to the continuous strengthening of ties between SSoM and Anthropology at Â鶹AV.
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
2:30 -4:00PM 3647 Peel Street Room 101
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What’s therapeutic about a “club thĂ©rapeutique”?Ěý
On the functions and effects of a particular form of institutional psychotherapy
To go there, it’s sufficient to have heard about the club, to know the opening hours, and to open the door. Situated in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, this particular “club thérapeutique” was founded in July 1960 at the intersection of institutional psychotherapy and the then emerging effort to reform the organizational principles of psychiatric care. The emergence of a “psychiatrie de secteur” from March 1960 onward was an effort to rethink and reform the structures and practice of psychiatric care in France, and where possible to treat patients outside of the hospital. Therapeutic clubs, as an institutional form, both predated these reforms and have continued to evolve as the landscape of different structures and associations available for psychiatric care and mutual aid has shifted. This club is a voluntary association which includes a team of six psychologists and an equal number of trainee students. Open to all, the majority of those who go to the club are patients with a history of psychosis. It is run via multiple governing bodies, of which there is: the General Assembly made up of the professional team and those patients who have made the choice to become members; the Administrative Council (an elected body); as well as the weekly overview meetings (La Synthèse) which is run by the professional team, at which the trainees are expected to attend, and which is open to all members of the club. The club is thus a place, a signifier, as well as a practice that endeavors to analyze constantly how this institution produces a collective, through the social bond, which is to say an open set of signifiers stemming from the fact that people come to the club and that they talk, putting into motion the question of their desire, the question of what they wish to do by way of the signifier, place and practice of the club. In this talk I start from the premise that there is nothing per se therapeutic about the social bond and the challenge will be to ask ethnographically both how the club functions and what constitutes a therapeutic effect, for those who work at the Club, and those who make use of it.
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Past Speakers
2024
Eric Plemons, University of Arizona. “What to make of me: Penile and uterine transplant and the surgical future of sex”
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2023
Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago. “Extractions of Breath: Class Action, Racial Capitalism, and the Unfinished Business of Transitional Justice in South Africa”
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2022
Nicole Charles, University of Toronto Mississauga. “Corporeal Traces and Unsettling Truths”
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