Pierre Schützenberger (1888–1973) : un aliéniste, expert dans l’affaire des sœurs Papin (Partie I)

Abstract

In Le Mans on 2 February 1933: Christine and Lea Papin murdered savagely their patroness Mrs Léonie Lancelin and her daughter, Geneviève, at their home. A trial that excited the whole of France and defrayed the chronicle. Pierre Schützenberger (1888–1973) was the head doctor at the mental asylum of Le Mans. The day after the crime, he was appointed as psychiatric expert. As a few weeks later, he shall be assisted in this task by Victor Truelle (1871–1938) and Jacques Baruk (1872–1975). Every two was alienists. The first was a head doctor at Sainte-Anne hospital in Paris and the second at Saint-Gemmes-sur-Loire asylum near Anger. The experts took the clear position of the absolute responsability of the defendants. A correspondence between Schützenberger and the psychiatrist Louis Le Guillant (1900–1968) allows us, on the one hand, to go behind the scenes of this expertise, which was vigorously challenged during and after the trial and, on the other hand, to situate it in the context of the 1930s. There was not a possible psychological analysis for P. Schützenberger in this case. As illustrated his non-published conference on freudism that was held on 9th March 1933. When reading one of this we note that he was very sceptical by the introduction of Psychoanalysis, which appeared to him to be a backward step compared with the French Somatical School's use of biological notions in Psychopathology.