Abstract
At the end of the eighteenth century, Philippe Pinel inaugurated psychiatric science, properly so-called, through a crucial theoretical gesture. By insisting on the methodical observation of patients, Pinel revealed the periodicity of mental disturbance—discrete, alternating episodes of delirium and lucidity.1 Where doctors once spoke of the mentally deranged asinsénsé—insensible—Pinel insisted that such individuals were in fact aliéné—alienated—and that within them remained a ‘reste de raison,’ a ‘shred of reason,’ from which they were temporarily separated.
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Notes
See Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, La pratique de l’esprit humain: L’institution asilaire et la révolution démocratique (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); recently published in an abridged translation as, Madness and Democracy: the Modern Psychiatric Universe, trans. Catherine Porter ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999 ).
Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, ‘Du traitement de la manie aux passions: la folie et l’union de l’âme et du corps,’ in Des Passions considérées comme causes, symptômes et moyens curatifs de l’aliénation mentale, par E. Esquirol (1805) (Paris: Librairie des deux-mondes, 1980), p. xxi.
See Sergio Moravia, ‘Philosophie et médecine en France à la fin du 18ème siècle,’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 89 (1972): 1089–151;
Dora B. Weiner, The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
and Guenter B. Risse, ‘Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment,’ in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, Andrew Wear (ed.) ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 ), pp. 149–95.
John Forrester, ‘If p, then what? Thinking in cases,’ History of the Human Sciences, 9 (3) (1996): 1–25.
Matt Reed, ‘Making the Case: the Evolution of the Case Study in Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry,’ PhD dissertation, Claremont Graduate University, 2002. Also see Ian Hacking, ‘Making up People,’ in T.C. Heller, M. Sosna, and D.E. Wellbery (eds), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 222–36; idem., Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995);
and Matt Reed, ‘Historicizing Inversion: How to Make a Homosexual,’ History of the Human Sciences, 14(4) (2001): 1–30.
Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979 ), p. 193.
See, for instance, Ian Hacking, ‘World-Making by Kind-Making: Child Abuse for Example,’ in M. Douglas and D. Hull (eds), How Classification Works: Nelson Goodman among the Social Sciences ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992 ), pp. 180–238.
The secondary literature in this philosophical vein is immense, spanning the Greeks to Freud. A few recent texts serve as a useful tour d’horizon; see, for example, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992);
Jerrold Siegel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 );
and Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005 ).
See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; idem., The History of Sexuality, Volume I: an Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); Hacking, Rewriting the Soul; and Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 ).
These figures also correspond roughly to one or more of the characteristics of modern selves as suggested by Taylor: interiority, freedom, individualism (distinctiveness), and embeddedness in nature. A number of works illuminate the cultural history and significance of these exemplars, each of which was also in its own way a vector for key aspects of modern identities. On the criminal, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish. On the madman, see Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1965)
and Gauchet and Swain, La pratique de l’esprit humain. On the hysteric, see Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1; Mark Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the fin de siècle (New York: Viking, 1990).
On the pervert, see Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
and Vernon Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Robert A. Nye’s work has exhaustively demonstrated the role of degenerative heredity in nineteenth-century France and the important role it played in the discovery of the perversions at the fin de siècle. See his Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: the Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) and Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor.
See also Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: a European Disorder, c.1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 )
and Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries ( Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994 ).
See Gauchet and Swain, La pratique de l’esprit humain; Gladys Swain, Le Sujet de la Folie, 2nd edn (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997 [1977]) and Dialogue avec l’insensé ( Paris: Gallimard, 1994 ).
See, for example, Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 )
and Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989 ).
See, for example, Pierre Nora, Les Lieux des memoire: La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984 )
and Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988 ).
See Weiner, The Citizen-Patient and W. F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century ( Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ).
For example, see Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Robert Castel, The Regulation of Madness: the Origins of Incarceration in France, trans. W. D. Halls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988);
and Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: the French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century ( Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987 ).
Bénédict-Augustin Morel, Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humain ( Paris: Victor Masson, 1857 ).
For instance, see Prosper Lucas, Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’hérédité naturelle dans les états de santé et de maladie du système nerveux (Paris: J.-B. Baillière, 1847);
Jacques Moreau de Tours, La Psychologie morbide dans ses rapports avec la philosophie de l’histoire ou de l’influence des névropathies sur le dynamisme intellectuel (Paris: Masson, 1859);
P.A. Piorry, De l’hérédité dans les maladies ( Paris: Bury, 1840 ).
Bénédict-Augustin Morel, Traité des maladies mentales (Paris: Victor Masson, 1860), p. iii.
This allowed Morel to sidestep the problems of traditional classification, which were based on the observation and categorization of symptoms. It posed no problem to Morel if, in a single patient, melancholia shaded into mania and was accompanied by various kinds of monomania, derangement of ideas, or eccentricities. (See Jules Falret, ‘Discussion sur les classifications de la folie,’ Annales médico-psychologiques, 7 (1861): 145–77.) Likewise, Morel avoided the mimetic problem faced by previous proponents of hereditary mental disorders: the transmission of an identical malady was no longer a necessary condition for establishing a hereditary link.
Bénédict-Augustin Morel, ‘Consultation médico-légale sur l’état mental de Jeanson,’ Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 32 (1869): 153–210. My emphasis.
E. Dumesnil, ‘De la folie raisonnante et de l’importance du délire des actes pour le diagnostic et la médecine légale, par le docteur A. Brierre de Boismont,’ Annales médico-psychologiques, 10 (1867): 574–82.
Gabriel Doutrebente, ‘Étude géneologique sur les aliénés héréditaires,’ Annales médico -psychologiques, 2 (1869): 197–237; 369–94.
Auguste Motet, ‘Rapport sur le prix Esquirol pour l’année 1868,’ Annales médicopsychologiques, 2 (1869): 148–54.
Philippe Bouchez, ‘Rapport fait à la Société médico-psychologique sur le Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui les produisent, par le docteur B.-A. Morel,’ Annales médico-psychologiques, 3 (1857): 455–67; my emphasis.
Henri Girard de Cailleux, ‘Discussion sur les aliénés avec conscience de leur état,’ Annales médico-psychologiques, 3 (1870): 466–86.
A number of cultural historians have addressed the attention paid to each of these groups in late nineteenth-century France. See Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981);
Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-the-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991 );
and Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr (eds), Homosexuality in Modern France, ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 ).
Valentin Magnan and Paul-Maurice LeGrain, Les Dégénérés (Paris: Reuff, 1895), p. 79; as quoted in Nye, Crime, Madness and Modern Politics, p. 124.
Valentin Magnan and Jean-Martin Charcot, ‘De l’onomatomanie,’ Archives de neurologie, 10 (1885): 157–68.
Valentin Magnan, ‘De l’Enfance des criminels dans ses rapports avec la prédisposition naturelle au crime,’ Archives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, 4 (1889): 549–615.
Auguste Motet, ‘Outrage public à la pudeur. Condamnation.—Appel.—Confirmation,’ Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, 15 (1886): 202–13.
Rosario, The Erotic Imagination and Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: a Cultural History of Masturbation ( New York: Zone Books, 2004 ).
Under the Third Republic, public decency laws were a common way to regulate private behaviors and were regularly used to police sexual activities of many kinds—sodomy, prostitution, genital exposure, even adultery. See Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor; Merrick and Ragan, Homosexuality in Modern France; and Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis, Homosexuality in French History and Culture ( Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2001 ).
Jules Christian, ‘Des asiles d’aliénés à portes ouvertes,’ Annales médicopsychologiques, 6 (1897): 446–65.
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Reed, M.T. (2010). From aliéné to dégénéré: Moral Agency and the Psychiatric Imagination in Nineteenth-Century France. In: Forth, C.E., Accampo, E. (eds) Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246843_4
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