Fonctions de l’anticipation et images de l’homme : apports de la philosophie analytique à la psychiatrie du futur

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This study combines the conceptual analysis method and the psychopathological and psychiatric clinical method to elucidate the functions of anticipation. The meaning of the term anticipation has evolved over time according to philosophical currents. It is at the turning point of the 19th and 20th centuries that the emphasis will be placed on anticipation as a process of thought, an operation of the mind, generating an action of representation of concepts, theories or conduct, of future acts directed towards an object to be built. Anticipation is both an act of thought and a conduct; it is not a static process and the functions of anticipation are not analyzed on the basis of the same criteria according to whether the individual is evoked or referred to as the collective, whether we focus on the real or the virtual, whether we explore the world of life or the physical world. The author analyses here the peculiarities of anticipatory thinking in the psychopathological and psychiatric clinic as well as the impact of the entanglement between manifest and scientific images described by Wilfrid Sellars. The author recalls the contribution of Professor Sutter on the inability to anticipate in depressed patients, his own analyses of parental anticipation, the child's ability to anticipate and failures in mental disorders. It appears in these settings a primacy of the manifest image of man in relations to others and a primacy of the scientific image of man in the theoretical constructions that we operate with the objective of a creative anticipation. The manifest image of man then appears as one of the referents of thought that restrains or, on the contrary, energizes any anticipatory process insofar as elements of the scientific image also infiltrate it. In all fields, anticipation intersects various aspects, analysed with reference to the language used, common or specialized. The result is the creation of anticipatory systems representing all sectors of knowledge and the need to use the analytical method. To anticipate in the context of mental health is, at the same time, to rely on the manifest image of the man of our time and to project the scientific image of the man in a future time, of which we do not yet conceive the technical, ideological and societal limits. It is also to wonder what new objects of thought will be on a distant horizon.