La Bête humaine and the Incorporation of Psychiatry: du monstre lombrosien à l’anormal zolien, de la mécanique à la thermodynamique

Abstract

In this chapter we will be examining a number of shifts that occur as psychiatry becomes incorporated as discipline, in particular the one flagged in the previous chapter whereby monstrosity is pathologised as abnormality, examined here in greater detail in relation to mid-nineteenth-century aliéniste literature, significant elements of which are incorporated almost invisibly within Émile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bête humaine. Those shifts include the following: the physiologisation, the incorporation, the situation within the body — as opposed to the nebulous location of the mind — of mental illness; the shift from delusion to instinct in the consideration of madness; the shift from classical mechanics to thermodynamics in the understanding of the impossibility of the perpetual motion sought historically by necromancers and eccentrics, and, in the nineteenth century, by monomaniacs; and the shift from the eccentric idée fixe to monomania, a key notion in early psychiatry, which was central to that discipline’s increasing involvement in the criminal justice system, and is our starting point.