Abstract
AimsToday, the notion of violence occupies an increasingly large place in the psychiatric and psychopathological field, which deserves to be explored. First identified as “violent behavior” amenable to psychoanalytic analysis, violence has been an object of psychopathological study on the boundaries between crime and psychopathology, to become a quasi clinical entity with the notion of the “violent patient” whose dangerousness must be evaluated, following on from that of the “difficult patient”. MethodsThe study of developments in psychoanalytic work and the psychopathology of action give a psychic dynamic and a meaning to acting out, which becomes a mode of expression of psychic suffering, an acting out mobilised by complex psychic processes. ResultsThe extension of the notion of the “violent patient” goes against the rich semiological notions derived from classic psychiatric observation. The agitation, the fury, the raptus, the confusional state, or the acute attack of anguish can be usefully reread in the light of current psychopathological trends, and this can make it possible to reestablish a clinical view of the organization of care practices. DiscussionThe institutional response, which constrains bodies and isolates them from society, puts negative emphasis on the fact that the clinical approach to violence is above all a clinical approach to the body and an intersubjective encounter entailing massive anxieties. ConclusionIt is by giving back a place to the body and to the act in the expression of “agonistic terrors” that we can find a clinical semiology that brings violence out of a solely threatening perspective.
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