The postwar expansion of psychiatry beyond the clinic opened a space for understanding subjectivity not as a fixed entity but as a dynamic process shaped by affective, spatial, and technological vectors. At the heart of this shift was the idea that bodily movement—gestures, postures, muscular tensions—could reveal internal states prior to verbal articulation, challenging the primacy of language in psychoanalysis. Building on the work of Emilio Mira y López and Gestalt psychology, psychiatrists like François Tosquelles approached the body as a field of expression, where motor activity constituted a form of knowledge. This understanding was operationalised in therapeutic settings through ergotherapy, where repetitive or novel movements disrupted pathological fixations, enabling new affective and cognitive configurations. Movement was not random but trajectorial—a way of tracing subjectivity across space, marked by migration, exile, and the right to roam. In this sense, Tosquelles envisioned the human as fundamentally a migrant figure, whose freedom resided in mobility rather than stasis. His “hypocritical method”, developed through surrealist photomontages and psychiatric experimentation, inverted dominant perceptual hierarchies by placing feet above the head, emphasising the groundedness of thought in corporeal, earthly movement. This revaluation of movement as both therapeutic and political subverted colonial and institutional logics that equated stability with order and pathology with displacement. Instead, the act of walking, wandering, migrating became not only a gesture of resistance but a condition for the reconstitution of selfhood within oppressive environments.
(Vogman, E. (2024) ‘Geo-psychiatry: Media and the Ecologies of Madness’, Grey Room, 97, pp. 76–117.
