The materiality of psychiatry

Matérialité de la psychiatrie en anglais / The materiality of psychiatry.
Psychiatry is a field of research that has been explored for a long time. The study of this discipline, its practice and its development, has gone alongside the development of psychiatry itself. Sociologists at the end of the 19th century questioned the contributions and limitations of mental illness sciences in the study of societies, the inclusion or not of psychology being at the heart of the disciplinary dispute between Gabriel Tarde and Émile Durkheim.
Like alienists, later called psychiatrists, their reflections are based on descriptions of asylum patients through snippets of observations or statistical insights often taken from medical literature. The fields of observation are obviously the asylum, which is not always easy to access, the prison, the public space of the streets, or even the restricted circle of families who care for a loved one at home. In the 20th century, Allan Young incorporated the genealogical method into his ethnography of a psychiatric service treating veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (P. Béhague, Lézé, 2015), and Georges Devereux (1970) promoted an influential form of ethnopsychoanalysis in France.
Studied for its political or social function, following Michel Foucault (1961) and Erving Goffman's seminal work (1968; French translation 1975), particularly through asylum internment, psychiatry is also examined in its everyday practice, at ground level, by patients and professionals.
Implicitly, a whole ethnographic impulse attentive to detail emerges. At the same time, psychiatry questions itself with the help of ethnography: The Fann Clinic in Dakar has been central to the development of an ever-influential ethnopsychiatry, and institutional psychotherapy feeds on social sciences (Gallien, Collignon, 2022).
More recently, among the research projects focusing on psychiatry since the early 2000s, many have employed ethnographic methods (Monjaret, 2001 ; Velpry, 2006 ; Henckes, 2007 ; Moutaud, 2009 ; Moreau, 2017 ; Marques, 2011 ; Tartour, 2021 ; Linder, 2023). Following these investigations, and acknowledging the close disciplinary links between ethnography and psychiatry mentioned above, this call for paper invites the study of psychiatry using ethnographic methods. More specifically, we invite you to question and analyse its materiality: that of places, bodies, objects, and everything else without restriction, in order to paint a detailed picture of psychiatry as captured by ethnography.
Generally speaking, we seek to understand what constitutes psychiatry in material terms, both as a specific material field and as a vantage point from which to observe our societies. How is psychiatry practised and experienced, in concrete terms and at a deeply personal level, by its professionals and users? Finally, and in parallel, how does a study of psychiatry through the prism of its materiality allow for both an analysis of everyday psychiatric life and a point of entry for reflection on ethnographic methods?

1- Institution en pratique / institution in practice

This axis invites an ethnography of the structure as it progresses, going beyond it to observe psychiatry in society as a whole. It will be necessary to address (de)ambulant analyses: routine(s) and daily life within and beyond the psychiatric hospital, but also the materiality of psychiatry in its most tangible traces. What affects psychiatry and what does it affect in turn? How is the psychiatric environment shaped?
Admission, wandering around, discharge or longer stays: analyses may focus on distant or participatory observation, on different moments of the medical routine or its unexpected events, and on all the departments and spaces that make up the psychiatric hospital: medical departments, of course, but also administrative, legal, technical departments, etc. It is really a matter of wandering around the hospital (La Soudière, 2023, Higelin-Cruz, 2024), which may include the mechanisms designed to open the institution to the outside world, following the physicality of the reception desk, admission and discharge. This physicality may consist of objects used to diagnose, measure or treat gestures (Bert and Lamy, 2021), which are then studied as the physical tools of psychiatric production.
Recording and classification tools particularly useful for clinical compilation (Foucault, 1963), scientific or evaluative statistics (Cases, Salines, 2004; Martin, 2020), and medical innovation (Edgerton, 1998; Tournay, 2007), paper technologies used for medical administration or clinical testing allow for fruitful reflection on documents and archives, their forms and uses by the institution and the officials who handle them (Gardey, 2008; Rossigneux-Méheust, 2018; Spire, 2008), and the construction of a certain memory.
The anthropology of work (Arborio, Cohen, Fournier, et al., 2008; Hardy, 2013; Gardella, 2016; Mougeot, 2019) can, non-exclusive, be a relevant perspective (Gibert, Monjaret, 2021). Organisational observations can also enable a detailed analysis of procedures, timeframes and routine or non-routine practices in psychiatric hospitals (Demailly, Haliday, 2022). Admission procedures (Dubois, 2010; Fassin, 2004; Lipsky, 1980) are obviously relevant, as are the conditions of discharge from hospital.
Today, by adopting a microsociological perspective, it is still enlightening to use the concept of total institution developed by Goffman (1968; French translation 1975), in its heuristic sense, to question the biases of ‘detotalisation’ (Combessie, 2000; Rostaing, 2009) in institutions, and to observe psychiatry through the prism of mechanisms that tend to (re)introduce control and coercion (Coldefi, Gandré and Rallo, 2022; Gansel and Lézé, 2015; Génard, Rossigneux-Méheust (eds.), 2023), including in types of care that appear to be ‘detotalisante’ because they are extra-hospital (Moreau and Marques, 2020).
The renewal of psychiatry, which has been underway since the mid-1950s in both its conception and practice, formerly referred to as a movement of ‘deinstitutionalisation’ (Castel 1981: Goffman 1989), is now examined in a more nuanced way as a ’dehospitalisation" (Guillemain, Klein and Thifault, 2018) of psychiatry. As psychiatric hospitals develop outpatient care modalities and engage in a dynamic of ‘reaching out’, the question arises of studying the centrifugal and centripetal movements that bring about dialogue between the intra- and extra-hospital in all their dimensions (Higelin-Cruz, 2024). As witnesses to the effervescence and mobility of psychiatry, the relationships between psychiatry, psychiatric hospitals and their environment are subjects for analysis.
This axis is also particularly interested in the materiality of psychiatry in its most tangible manifestations. Inside the hospital. Attention is also paid to the material dimensions of space, tools and everyday psychiatric life (Majerus, 2013), embraced from an ethnographic perspective. In a retrospective ethnography approach (Artières, 2014), it also applies to archives, whether they are legally preserved and used in a regulation-compliant practice to be observed as institutional work, or whether they are more personal and unofficial archives: therapeutic productions in art or expression workshops, sometimes exhibited in dedicated institutional spaces such as the Arts et Déchirure museum at the Rouvray hospital centre, drawings displayed in office corners or corridors, graffiti left on a wall, personal archives, patient writings, or even clothing and photographs (Artières, 2013; Foucault, 1961; Jaccard, 2022; La ferme du Vinatier and La Passe du Vent publishing house, 2018; Scarfone, 2020).
Thus, the architecture of the premises and the layout of the hospital's spaces and services are also considered as a physical and spatial organisation of psychiatric care: the movement of patients and professionals, reception and treatment areas, different units, professional spaces, areas reserved for more intimate interactions, and any alcove, corridor, large room or storage room that may be of interest to ethnography (Higelin, 2011). This theme may also include reflections on the practices of these spaces, in that they are a place of life for users and/or medical staff with distinct experiences of the place.

2- La corporéité de la psychiatrie / The corporeality of psychiatry
The hospital must be thought of in terms of bodies, in terms of the physical and embodied reality of the individuals who wander around, interact, avoid each other, exchange jokes, cigarettes or arguments, which together articulate the sociability of the place and the organisation of services. It is a place of life, where people wait for someone, watch the dust and head to the canteen, where the table is a new observatory of sociability in the asylum.
This area focuses more specifically on users of psychiatric services in the broadest sense: within the hospital or outside of it, on a regular, prolonged or occasional basis, including patients, informal caregivers their varying degrees of involvement within the institution and its branches (Morgiève, Briffault, 2014). Proposals may examine theories and compare them with the practices of professionals in their relationship with patients in order to identify certain criteria (Haliday, 2023). They can also, in a reverse movement, study how users seize and understand psychiatry. The interaction between these two approaches, namely the dynamics of adaptation and adjustment, is also relevant.
In psychiatric hospitals, and more broadly in health and social care institutions, different profiles and trajectories intersect over time. Studies have focused on children (Coffin, Le Bras, 2021) and adolescents (Coutant, 2012), on elderly people (Rossigneux-Méheust, Derrien, 2026), on patients of foreign origin (Sicot, Touhami, 2015; sometimes with interpreters: Pian, Hoyez, Tersigni, 2018) or on a migratory path (Petit, Wang, 2018; Saglio-Yatzimirsky, Wolmark, 2018), on traumatised military personnel (Derrien, 2015; Young, 1995); and on many other figures who can be studied according to various categories or grouped together as a population of hospital users who help to construct its daily reality.
The daily routine of psychiatry partly escapes its direct rules, opening up the possibility for secondary adjustments. We therefore invite to reflect on the more discreet categories of this social world: what are the intimate relationships between individuals? What about sexuality? Anger? How do these relationships and emotions concretely shape psychiatry, create divided spaces even in the layout of places – by isolating certain people or by creating spaces of solidarity? Besides the administrative and psychiatric categories that allow us to understand these individuals, as the institution already does in part, this theme invites us to recall the physical reality of lives, in flesh and emotion, which converge and shape asylum and contemporary psychiatry.
The ethnography of space includes observation of bodies, both in isolation and in interrelationships, in queues for medication, just as in groups in hospital canteens, or in personal spaces that are cobbled together in hospitals (Goffman, 1973). Finally, the question of dead bodies in the institution can also be raised, whether or not they interact with the living (Bernard, 2018; Schepens (ed.), 2013).

3- Ethnographie et psychiatrie : apports réciproques et mises en tension / Ethnography and psychiatry: reciprocal contributions and tensions

At first glance, there appears to be a hiatus between a discipline historically understood as oriented toward the psyche and the mind, and an ethnography that insists on everything that seems to be initially set aside, down to the trivial details of a tablecloth or an exchanged cigarette. However, from the perspective of ethnography, but also of a large number of psychiatric professionals, it appears that the materiality of everyday life is central to understand psychiatry on the one hand, and to grasp the intimate experiences of a part of society on the other.
The question is also methodological, as raised in the introduction: what does ethnography allow us to understand about psychiatry, either specifically or in dialogue with other methods and disciplinary approaches? Is psychiatry an ethnographic field like any other? What exactly does ethnography allow us to study in psychiatry and, reverse, what does the field of psychiatry teach us about ethnographic methods?

In a more reflective and historical approach, the humanities and social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology, are undergoing methodological tensions in Western Europe that are consistent with the transformations in the field of psychiatry as a medical discipline, questioning their fundamental concepts and postulates and testing them against old subjects and new approaches. Social science research rightly takes a long-term view in order to understand the practices and theories at work in psychiatric hospitals (Castel, 1976; Quétel, 2012; Von Bueltzingsloewen, 2010): how can the historicity of French psychiatry be revealed through an ethnographic approach and, inversevely, how can the long term shed light on contemporary ethnographic practices?
In particular, as in the study of the Fann Clinic in Dakar mentioned earlier, we encourage multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary research combining ethnographic and psychiatric fieldwork and subjects, examining how the two disciplines can interact or even hybridize, or reconstructing the historical and social conditions of the links between them.
In the most intrinsically ethnographic aspects of psychiatry, for example at the more direct level of the doctor-patient bond, ethnography can follow the procedures of a medical decision intended to be shared, of medical ethics that leave room for the patient's wishes, or more broadly observe the organisation of care that may leave therapeutic initiatives to the patient: art therapy or the organisation of mutual support groups. Ethnography can thus enable us to test, through observation of practice, contemporary discourses that promote experiential knowledge and consideration of the patient's opinion, and more generally a horizontalization of care in the relationship between professionals and patients (Jouet, Greacen, 2012).
* Proposals for contributions (title and abstract of 5,000 to 6,000 characters, in French or English) should be sent by the 15th of April 2026 to the coordinators of this issue:
They should present the main lines of argument, the empirical materials used and be accompanied by a bio-bibliographical note on the author.
* Final texts (35,000 to 70,000 characters max., including spaces and bibliography) are expected by the 23rd of September 2026.
* This issue of Ethnologie Française is scheduled for publication at the end of 2027.