Marc Bourgeois et l’histoire de la psychiatrie

Abstract

In his books and his articles, Marc Bourgeois has studied the history and the evolution of several morbid entities: Cotard's syndrome, melancholia, bipolar disorders (clinical cases of Ritti, observation of King Charles VI), folie du doute, nostalgia. He has described the context and the consequences of the bursting of the hysteria, criticized the disappearance of chronic hallucinatory psychosis in contemporary classifications, studied the evolution of the concept of awareness of illness in clinical psychiatry, distinguished scientific and psychological truths during a long time, analyzed the psychopathology of European sovereigns since the roman Antiquity, evoked the medication of mental disorders before the antipsychotic drugs. He has published eleven biographical notices in the Annales Médico-Psychologiques and narrated the history of psychiatry in Bordeaux. In the introduction of the collective book published under his direction, “2000 years of psychiatry”, he has adopted the periodization in paradigms described by Lantéri-Laura during the 19th and the 20th centuries and foretold for the 21th a psychiatric discipline dominated by the neurosciences, the influence of groups of “users” and the growth of the administrative power.