Roundtable, April 02, 2025

2:30 – 4:30 PM

McGill University

Department of Social Studies of Medicine

3647 Peel (Room 101)

Montréal QC

Place and Psyche

Elena Vogman (Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar & ICI Berlin; Principal Investigator, “Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe”), Title: “Geo-psychiatry, or How to Heal by the Feet? Media and Milieus of Saint-Alban”

Coline Fournout (PhD candidate, McGill, Anthropology), Title: “Ghost Time at the Mad Cemetery, Saint-Alban Hospital”

Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau (Clinical Assistant Professor of History in Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College), Title: “On Imagined Spaces and Imagined Selves: Writing My Book in the Age of ChatGPT”

Ramzi Nimr (PhD candidate, McGill, Anthropology), Title: “Notes on Speculating the Hospital”

Todd Meyers, Moderator (Professor, McGill, Social Studies of Medicine)

Roundtable Theme

The Place and Psyche roundtable explores the experiential, conceptual, cultural, and political intertwining of place and psyche. Through specific cases, the roundtable aims to foster a discussion that might locate the psyche beyond the interior world of the individual. Here, place is more than a set of external conditions that impact and shape interiority: place and psyche are intertwined and productive of one another.

But how the relationship between psyche and place has been understood in different therapeutic approaches, using psychothérapie institutionnelle in France as but one example in the mid-twentieth century, raises basic questions about the dimensions of these concepts and the operative definitions of therapy itself. What could it mean for a place to feel, think, want, heal, or grieve? By extension, the roundtable will explore notions of atmosphere and ambience to think the psychic consistency of a place. The roundtable is a chance to explore the porous relationships of psyche and the environment, to imagine conscious and unconscious topographies, and to question how selves are done and undone through the spatialization of the psyche inside and outside therapeutic contexts.