Philippe Chaslin (1857–1923). À propos du centenaire des Éléments de sémiologie et de la discordance (1912)

Abstract

Belonging to the last generation of the alienists of Paris hospitals, Philippe Chaslin begins his career in 1887 as physician of the lunatic sections at the hospital of Bicêtre. He is then (1910) physician in chief at the Salpêtrière hospital and becomes president of the Société Medico-Psychologique in 1917. His service is closed in 1921, one year before his retreat. He has published about 40 papers and three books on the “mental confusion” (1895), the psychiatric semiology (1912) and the psychology of mathematics (posthumous, 1926). Partisan of an empirical and descriptive approach of the mental pathology, opposite to the theoretical classifications, he criticizes the paradigm of “mental illness” and promotes the concepts of mental disorder, “clinical type” and syndrome in psychiatry. He rigorously separates the symptomatology from the etiology, operates a dichotomy between mental disorders of recognized (organic) and of unknown origin. His description of the “mental confusion” has leaded to the organic disorder named Delirium in the DSM. He introduced the concept of discordance, as an alternative to Bleuler's Spaltung (dissociation), in the symptomatology of the schizophrenia. He also published studies about the psychiatric terminology, about the reformation of the hospitals at the beginning of the 20th century and about the psychoanalysis, while Freud was still alive. His approach of the mental symptomatology has been very influential until the present time, especially on the DSM.