Imagining with Tosquelles

In this age, in which Earth’s diagnosis is fatal, we are living through a kind of end of days: the future has been reduced to an impotent, suffocating present. Today, it is necessary to seek ways of life and of thinking that can broaden new horizons of possibility, going beyond what presents itself to us as irremediable. The aim of this research is none other than to retrieve the witnessing of imaginative ways of living in the therapeutic field, working beyond the frame of what is predictable, and understanding the ways in which these ways of life are underpinned by specific philosophical-political notions. In particular, in this article, we will look at how Francesc Tosquelles, a Catalonian psychotherapist who developed his work in Saint-Alban (France), generated an ecosystem, a community of practice, in line with what we call ecology of the imagination. His practice exemplifies the way in which imagination is a key political tool for drawing up collective ways of life that are distanced from the status quo. Finally, this article also aims to indicate the existing connections between his work and that of authors of his time, such as Minkowski, Arendt, and Benjamin, with whom he shared philosophical conceptualizations around the notions of identity and time, key ideas for the discipline he developed as institutional psychotherapy. This school of thought conceived of therapy as the collective task of accompanying the patient in the imaginative process of weaving the past and future together to give rise to identity.