L’idée qui absorba les facultés de l’entendement. Du syncrétisme des conceptions linguistiques de Philippe Pinel

Abstract

ObjectiveThe historical literature has produced a dismemberment of the figure of Pinel and his posterity.The purpose of this article is first to confront Pinel with himself and with the paradoxes of his theoretical influences. In this, the approach of the theories of language represents one perspective among many on the conceptual foundations of alienism. The highlighting of a syncretism in the conceptions of the relation of thought to language mobilized by Pinel makes it possible to cast doubt on the theoretical influences that he most ostensibly claims as his own, and that are most stubbornly attributed to him. MethodsIn an attempt to discriminate between the different conceptions of the thought-language relationship in Pinel's work, we analyze the occurrences of the word “idea” when the latter is used in an effort to describe, or conceptualize, the thought of the insane. We base ourselves on a typology of the varied modes that can be mapped onto the relation between thought and language, which we have established from the theories of language that may have influenced Pinel's conceptions: that of Condillac, that of Locke, and that of the Germanic tradition (Herder). ResultsThe perspective of the thought-language relationship shows the extent to which Pinel had relied on divergent and sometimes contradictory theoretical views. Whether or not Pinel drew on Condillac's theories of language is of little importance. He necessarily got something out of them ; and his conception of the thought-language relationship on the basis of Condillac's theories of language comes into direct contradiction with other significant theoretical influences. This allows us to define the linguistic conceptions of the alienist as syncretic. DiscussionMichel Foucault explains what he calls the “isomorphism” of language and of reality by the preponderant influence of the philosophy of Condillac on the doctors of the beginning of the 19th century. That is to say, the predetermination of what is perceived by doctors as a symptom, and by the structure of the taxonomy, and therefore of the language, which is called upon to perceive it. This is the constitutive fragility of psychiatry.The concept of an anthropological syncretism of the conceptual foundations of psychiatry, which we present here, opens up a perspective according to which it would be a constitutive quality that does not weaken psychiatry but, conversely, consolidates it by matching theories to the syncretism of human practice. ConclusionThe epistemological notion of anthropological syncretism qualifies the conceptual foundations of psychiatry viewed from the angle of its progressive elaboration by the men and women who put something of themselves into their practice of it. Because more than simply humanist, psychiatry is a human practice.