The Ethic, Phenomenology and Diagnostic of Post-war French Psychiatry

Reggio, David. 2006. The Ethic, Phenomenology and Diagnostic of Post-war French Psychiatry. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

The thesis seeks to examine the ethical, phenomenological and diagnostic renewal of psychiatry in post-war France. The particular focus of study will be to bring to light (1) the emergence of a psychiatric movement that was to become known as Institutional Psychotherapy in 1952, (2) the inauguration of a particular post-war clinical sentiment of sympathy, (3) and the more specific developments of the psychopathology of schizophrenia undertaken by Dr. Francois Tosquelles and Dr. Jean Oury. The thesis is composed of three chapters:

The first chapter of the thesis, presents a bi-focal analysis of a philanthropic politic characterising two significant moments of medical reform, where psychiatry finds its Hippocratic and Apostolic definition as a vocation addressing the imperial need of man. The first moment, is that of Philippe Pinel in a Post-Revolutionary France, who urged for more specialised spaces employing the non-violent treatment of the insane. The second, is the German Occupation of France, where the psychiatrist's personage in the questionably 'free' Vichy South is one that is dramatic and resistant. This historical study is conducted in order to bring to light the methodological shift within the history of European psychiatry: what was the art of medicine and alienation for Pinel of the Paris Pitié Salpêtrière, is extended and redefined as the art of sympathy and dis-alienation for those of the clinical fraternity of Saint-Alban.

The second chapter, observes the 1948 doctoral thesis of Dr. Francois Tosquelles and the conditions of its emergence. Addressed is the "polydimensional" approach of Institutional Psychotherapy in its marrying the psychoanalytical, the biological, the theological, the neurological and the phenomenological, and as to how such an approach reasons the negation of madness to be said of a positive, constructive, aesthetic and industrial paradigm.

The third chapter seeks to demonstrate the empirico-phenomenological attitude of Institutional Psychotherapy by observing the works of Dr. Jean Oury, Jacques Schotte, Viktor von Weizsacker and Henri Maldiney, and as to how they pertain to a "pathic" diagnostic of schizophrenia, a diagnostic of the felt rather than the thought, where the psychiatric symptom is at once empirical and transcendental.

Item Type:

Thesis (Doctoral)

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00028947

Keywords:

psychiatry, post-war France, Institutional Psychotherapy, schizophrenia, Francois Tosquelles, Jean Oury

Date:

2006

Item ID:

28947

Date Deposited:

03 Jul 2020 13:42

Last Modified:

08 Sep 2022 15:45

URI:

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28947

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