Crise d’originalité juvénile ou psychose débutante ? Les représentations de l’adolescence « à risque » après-guerre en France et en Allemagne

Abstract

ObjectivesThis analysis focuses on the representations of the early signs of madness during adolescence and the diagnosis of early onset psychosis. It starts with a brief historical overview of the place of adolescence in 19th and 20th century psychiatry in France and Germany, to show how representations of adolescence have changed. MethodThe method followed here combines archival analysis, and quantitative and qualitative methods with an epistemological analysis of normativity in a comparative perspective. Crossing French and German (histoire croisée) history enables a reappraisal of the object of research through the prism of the historical sources available in another language. ResultsThe hypothesis of a causal relation between the first signs of a mental disorder and puberty is one of the recurrent questions in contemporary psychiatry. It was conceptualized as such by way of the notion of hebephrenia, which was used for a long time to describe teenage madness, before being reassessed as an early sign of schizophrenia. DiscussionThe discussion focuses on the medical appropriation of the representations of adolescence. This is put in the perspective of the emergence of the new objective of early detection and intervention appearing in the 1970s and 1980s, while the post-war era only focused on the notion of a teenage originality crisis and early expression. ConclusionHaving highlighted the role of questionnaires in the early diagnosis of mental disorders, the author argues in favor of the integration of the history of epidemiological psychiatry into that of psychiatry and psychology, given that questionnaires are used to measure the prevalence of early disorders.