Introduction to the Problem

Abstract

It is interesting to note that in their own discipline contemporary psychiatrists have brought about a rectification and restatement of the concepts of normal and pathological from which physicians and physiologists apparently have not cared to draw a lesson concerning themselves. Perhaps the reason for this is to be sought in the usually closer relations between psychiatry and philosophy through the intermediary of psychology. In France, Blondel, Daniel Lagache, and Eugène Minkowski in particular have contributed to a definition of the general essence of the morbid or abnormal psychic fact and its relations with the normal. In his La conscience morbide [‘Morbid Consciousness’ (Paris, Alcan, 1914)], Blondel describes cases of insanity where the patients seem incomprehensible to others as well as to themselves, where the doctor really has the impression of dealing with another mental structure; he seeks the explanation for this in the impossible situation where these patients translate the data of their cenesthesia into the concepts of normal language. It is impossible for the physician, starting from the accounts of sick men, to understand the experience lived by the sick man, for what sick men express in ordinary concepts is not directly their experience but their interpretation of an experience for which they have been deprived of adequate concepts.