L'objet de la psychiatrie et l'objet de la psychanalyse

Abstract

The author presents psychiatry and compares it to psychoanalysis. So as to define psychiatry the author rejects the incompleteness of etymological research and favours the idea of a medical psychology that emerges when madness breaks its connexions with the supernatural. The author reviews modern psychiatry starting from the end of the XVIII th century, distinguishing three periods each marked by the superiority of a particular paradigm in T.S. Kuhn’s sense of the word: mental alienation in the singular (1793–1854), mental illnesses in the plural (1854–1926), psychological structures (1926–1977), and, at the present time, postmodern psychiatry. The author rejects the idea of a philosophical history, which would somehow go beyond empirical and bibliographical research. He shows that XXI st century psychiatry is implacably heterogeneous with very blurred and merely conventional limits. He studies its relationship with other disciplines, not only knowledge of the central nervous system, clinical neurology and neuropsychology, but also anthropology, criminology and linguistics. He concludes that psychiatry and psychoanalysis have the same object, but see the object from different angles; the angles find their reflections in psychopathological theories; he maintains that psychoanalysis keeps a pertinence in the field of psychiatry connected with disorders of the central nervous system for even the demented, at least at the beginning of their disorders, maintain both a conscious and unconscious mental life.