And since the psychiatrist is also a sick person, you refuse to see the patient and doctor as two individuals who are naturally separated. This division has always resulted in turning the psychiatrist into the sole signifier (determining) and the patient into the sole signified (determined) and thus into a pure object. In contrast, you see the patient-doctor relationship as a dialectical unity which is present in each of them. Once patients have unified, then, within this dialectical relationship, depending on the circumstances, one or the other is the determining moment of the relationship, namely to the extent the patients either get stuck on the reactionary moment of the illness or else revolt against it and become aware of their true needs which are suppressed and deformed by society. From the knowledge that illness is, in all its forms of appearance, a general contradiction, and that each individual at the same time is both signifier and signified, it follows for patients that they must unify so that they divide and keep separate the reactionary moments (e.g. bourgeois ideology) and progressive moments (demand for a different society whose highest goal is the person and not profit). It goes without saying that this collective isn’t to be seen as a cure, because capitalism produces illness in every person and “psychiatric cure” only means a reintegration of patients into our society. Rather the collective seeks to bring illness to its culmination, to the point where it becomes a revolutionary force through a shared consciousness.
Jean-Paul Sartre in a letter response to West German anti-psychiatry group Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK), 1972
