38

Jean Oury claimed to be a POUMist, the party within which his mentor and friend François Tosquelles went through the Spanish revolution of 1936-1939. For sixty years, faithful to this commitment, he provided us with indispensable theoretical tools through the experiment at the La Borde clinic. His work reminds us unceasingly that humans are born into a language world, and so have a capacity of transfer, but man is also someone whose existence is based on work that does not have anything to do with alienated work and its hierarchies, its exclusions, its bureaucracy. In psychiatric wards, in order to accommodate patients, especially the most vulnerable ones—i.e. schizophrenics—we must start by curing hospitals. Hence the importance of therapeutic clubs and work on institutional counter-transference, impossible to accomplish without a radical questioning of the statutory hierarchy.