Jean Vinchon (1884–1964) : un précurseur de l’art-thérapie

Abstract

Jean Vinchon, admitted in 1910 in the competition of interns of the asylums of the Seine, is head of clinic at Gilbert Ballet when the Great War broke out; he is mobilized and finishes it at the psychiatric center of the army of Orient in Salonica; demobilized, he resumed his activity and in the inter-war period frequented surrealists like Guillaume Apollinaire whom he knew well; many French doctors at the time were interested in surrealism and the science of dreams introduced by Freud in the early twentieth century. Jean Vinchon will publish alone several books L’Art et la folie in 1924, Mesmer et son secret with a preface by Joseph Lévy-Valensi in 1926, which will have reissues corrected and increased in 1950, when is organized in Paris the first International Congress of Psychiatry at the end of which was born the World Association of Psychiatry; during this congress, an exhibition of psychopathological art is held in Sainte-Anne where several works from the collection brought together by Jean Vinchon; during this congress, an exhibition of psychopathological art is held in Sainte-Anne where several works from the collection brought together by Jean Vinchon; he very soon integrated painting and drawing into the psychotherapy of the patients he followed, considering that this was a new means of access to the unconscious. Jean Vinchon had published in 1930, in collaboration with M. Laignel-Lavastine, an important work on Les malades de l’esprit et leurs médecins du XVIeau XIXesiècle, where they already discuss the other paths to the unconscious that The Science of Sleep.