FREEPSY Creative Panel: Multi-tonal Reading: Breaking Down the Walls of the Asylum

On the 23rd of May, 9:30am – 11am (online), the FREEPSY collective and its collaborators will present a creative panel at the Northern Network for Medical Humanities conference: TONGUES: Medical Humanities across linguistic and cultural frontiers

This creative panel will document an on-going public engagement project, authored by an interdisciplinary research collective (FREEPSY), which consists in voicing ‘multi-tonal readings’ of the book My Farewell to the Yellow House, written in 1927 by Hungarian psychiatrist and psychoanalysts István Hollós, and recently translated to English (2024, 1968 Press). 

My Farewell to the Yellow House is a manifesto that rethinks the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. To follow István Hollós’s own words, it aims to break down the walls of the asylum. From the onset, we can read ‘asylum’ not strictly as an institution, a place, or a building, but as a psychic state, one where the demarcations between the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane’ are strong and unquestionable. The book also offers a sharp critique of society’s gaze upon madness. Hollós speaks of the fear of madness as a socially and psychically produced phenomenon, leading to exclusion, splitting, and various forms of authoritarianism. Hollós is thus part of a long line of radical psychiatrists, who were keenly aware of the societal importance of studying the ‘politics of madness’: Francesc Tosquelles, Ronald Laing, Franco Basaglia, Franca Ongaro, Franz Fanon, Felix Guattari and Jean Oury, to name but a few. This event-book turns on its head the question of who needs to be healed and who is doing the healing. As radical psychiatrists have argued, it is the psychiatric hospital, or the asylum, or even the doctor-patient relationship that needs to be cured. Tuning to the voice of the patients, Hollós writes: ‘We are the sick, but it is you healthy people who must be healed! Through us, the dreaming heroes, storytellers and lunatics, the axis of history creaks towards new, incredible cities and possibilities for life’ (‘What is a Lunatic’). 

Through the project ‘Multi-tonal Reading: Breaking Down the Walls of the Asylum’, the members of the FREEPSY research collective and their collaborators reflect on the meaning of translating (to seventeen different languages) and sounding-out sections of this event-book. They also reflect on creating a sound art piece out of the readings. The ‘multi-tonal readings’ aim to perform the ethics of otherness of My Farewell to the Yellow House. The translations to different languages are also translations between different worlds, opening a space for reflection on bearing witness, public testimony and the capacity of societal hosting of strangeness and madness. Rather than treating the recordings/voicings as individual pieces of work in different languages, we treat them as a ‘counter-point’ or ‘counter-song’ (Adorno), embodying the paradox of a multi-voiced music without a community. By reaching beyond academic audiences and tracing the othering of madness, the project aims to create a space of public testimony that works through principles of translation and multi-tonality. 

The panel proposes a creative format. We bring six individual short presentations, and two presentations of artistic practice and process, which draws on My Farewell to the Yellow House as its role in creating a series of sculptures/installations (Ana Čvorović) and on the creation of a sound art piece (Matt Faulkner). 

Author: freepsy