Guest Editors: Chris L. Smith, The University of Sydney, Anthony Faramelli, Goldsmiths, University of London

In an interview of 2007, the renowned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jean Oury (then in his eighties) stated: “the hospital is ill” [l’hôpital est malade]. He uses the word “hospital” to refer to the policies and procedures that constitute the hospital; the theories and philosophies of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and the organisational structures of the institution.  But the “hospital” of which Oury spoke was also clearly an architectural and urban object—a building or series of buildings and landscapes that might constitute a campus. Similarly, Frantz Fanon, a fellow traveller in institutional psychotherapy, worked to establish an architecture of relations that transformed the built environment in an effort to disalienate patients, a practice he later proposed for the establishment of the post-colonial state in Algeria. In fact, this explicit focus on architecture prompted his mentor and friend Francesc Tosquelles to write that Fanon had embodied therapeutic space. What Oury, Fanon and Tosquelles were flagging is that the relation between architecture and the psy sciences is a complex one… sometimes healthy and sometimes not.  Psychoanalysis, critical psychiatry, radical and institutional psychotherapy all have histories entwined with architecture and often when we consider the institutions that deal with acute mental health we cannot differentiate the operations of analysis, therapy and care from the rooms, buildings and contexts that constitute the hospital or clinic. This issue of Khōrein will explore both the architectural thought that finds itself in the psy sciences and the psychoanalysis and critical psychiatry that architecture has attached itself to, so intimately. 

We welcome papers focused on the architects and architectural theorists that have negotiated the theories and practices of the psy sciences—Solonet, Vidler, Ingraham, Lavin, Rendell, etc.—just as we welcome papers that focus on the architectural fixations of key protagonists of psychotherapy— Oury, Fanon, Tosquelles, Canguilhem, Guattari, Rolnik, etc.  Papers exploring the key sites of critical psychiatry—La Borde, St Alban, l’Eau Vive, Blida-Joinville etc., as well as explorations of contemporary psychiatric architecture would be encouraged. We are also very happy to receive papers that negotiate the contemporary forms of Institutional Psychoanalysis (IP) and Institutional Therapy (IT) and the promise such sub-fields hold for architecture.

Submissions should be emailed to khorein@ifdt.bg.ac.rs.

Submission deadline: September 1, 2025