Chaosophy - autonomous learning

an important position in the field of family therapy. As for Guattari,
he was very receptive to Elka'im's systemist theses, which had the
merit of envisaging therapy in terms of groups and not of desocialized
individuals. As a result, in January of 1975 they decided to
create an international network together in Brussels meant to
circulate information on experiments in progress. They named it
'ternative Network to psychiatry." Through this engagement,
Guattari expressed his desire to go beyond the theses of institutional
psychotherapy towards a depsychiatrization of madness,
taking the most innovative currents available as his starting points.
In order to create this network, in 1975 Mony Elkaim managed
to gather together Robert Castel and Franco Basaglia, in spite of
the latter's disagreements with Guattari. Robert Castel helped create
a friendly complicity between the two despite their divergences.
The initial title 'ternative to the Sector" was quickly dismissed
as too limited, and Basaglia's propoed 'ternative Network to
Psychiatry" was adopted instead.33 Guattari fully involved himself
in this network, which actively defended Franco Basaglia as well as
the German antipsychiatrists.
The Alternative Network served as a junction for various dissident
psychiatric practices. After the inaugural assembly in Brussels,
it sponsored many international meetings, for example in Paris
(March 1976), Trieste (September 1977), Cuernavaca, Mexico
(September 1978), and San Francisco (September 1980) ... The
purpose of these gatherings was not to instill a new orthodoxy, but
to be aware of what was being done elsewhere. In his interventions
within the Network, Guattari insisted on this nonproselytizing
attitude. In this domain, science could not set itself up as a unifying
authority, because successful practices could only arise from a
micropolitics whose singular nature was not limited in scale to
analyzing small groups, but instead implied a permanent dialogue
and a continuous process connecting it to the macro scale of the