One of the most remarkable implications of psychological medicine in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century was the advent of a new way of looking at the human being and new tools for analysing not only behaviour and individual experience, but also historical events, collective behavioural patterns or complex cultural achievements. Unsurprisingly, the deployment of this gaze could not advance without there being a series of disputes and controversies about its reach and the limits to its indiscriminate application. Focusing on the figure of French alienist Alexandre Brierre de Boismont and on the controversial cases of hallucinations and suicide, this article addresses the conflicts generated by the use of certain emblematic concepts and categories present in French psychological medicine throughout the central decades of the 19th-century, as well as the essentially ambivalent relationship of the psychopathological point of view with the criticism of a culture that was made responsible, then, as now, for a great number of psychological disorders and illnesses.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Le Maléfan, Pascal;
Sommer, Andreas;
(2015)
Léon Marillier and the Veridical Hallucination in Late-Nineteenth-and Early-Twentieth-Century French Psychology and Psychopathology
(/isis/citation/CBB001553604/)
Article
Philippe Huneman;
(2017)
From a religious view of madness to religious mania: the Encyclopédie, Pinel, Esquirol
(/isis/citation/CBB013167715/)
Article
Dan Degerman;
(2019)
‘Am I mad?’: the Windham case and Victorian resistance to psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB373188237/)
Article
Priest, Robert D.;
(2013)
“After the God and the Man, the Patient”: Jules Soury's Psychopathology of Jesus and the Boundaries of the Science of Religions in the Early Third Republic
(/isis/citation/CBB001201416/)
Article
David W Jones;
(2017)
Moral insanity and psychological disorder: the hybrid roots of psychiatry
(/isis/citation/CBB830638113/)
Article
Frank W. Stahnisch;
(2017)
Die Neurowissenschaften in Straßburg zwischen 1872 und 1945. Forschungstätigkeiten zwischen politischen und kulturellen Zäsuren
(/isis/citation/CBB544720683/)
Book
Chiang, Howard Hsueh-Hao;
(2014)
Psychiatry and Chinese History
(/isis/citation/CBB001422492/)
Article
Diederik F. Janssen;
(2020)
Noddle Pox: Syphilis and the Conception of Nosomania/Nosophobia (c. 1665–c. 1965)
(/isis/citation/CBB164570661/)
Book
Torrey, Edwin Fuller;
Miller, Judy;
(2001)
Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present
(/isis/citation/CBB000101575/)
Article
Pickersgill, Martyn;
(2014)
The Endurance of Uncertainty: Antisociality and Ontological Anarchy in British Psychiatry, 1950--2010
(/isis/citation/CBB001420397/)
Book
Waltraud Ernst;
Thomas Muller;
(2022)
Alcohol, Psychiatry and Society: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, C. 1700–1990s
(/isis/citation/CBB907976441/)
Article
Stephanie Lloyd;
Alexandre Larivée;
(2020)
Time, trauma, and the brain: How suicide came to have no significant precipitating event
(/isis/citation/CBB534263002/)
Book
Isabelle Perreault;
André Cellard;
Patrice Corriveau;
Christian Quesnel;
(2020)
Vous avez détruit la beauté du monde: Le suicide scénarisé au Québec depuis 1763
(/isis/citation/CBB672291352/)
Book
Reaume, Geoffrey;
(2000)
Remembrance of Patients Past: Patient Life at the Toronto Hospital for the Insane, 1770-1940
(/isis/citation/CBB000101654/)
Article
Diederik F Janssen;
(2019)
Rape of the lock: note on nineteenth-century hair fetishists
(/isis/citation/CBB788064945/)
Article
Hewitt, Jessie;
(2015)
Women Working “Amidst the Mad”: Domesticity as Psychiatric Treatment in Nineteenth-Century Paris
(/isis/citation/CBB001422233/)
Article
Novella, Enric J.;
Huertas, Rafael;
(2011)
Alexandre Brierre de Boismont and the Origins of the Spanish Psychiatric Profession
(/isis/citation/CBB001232199/)
Article
Jan Dirk Blom;
(2020)
Hallucinations and Illusions by Edmund Parish: the unlikely genesis and curious fate of a forgotten masterpiece
(/isis/citation/CBB812661627/)
Article
Viviana Faschi;
(2018)
Nietzsche's Illness Diagnosis Issues: A Review of His Clinical Records and Some Recent Hypotheses
(/isis/citation/CBB271866077/)
Article
Sommer, Andreas;
(2011)
Professional Heresy: Edmund Gurney (1847--88) and the Study of Hallucinations and Hypnotism
(/isis/citation/CBB001230172/)
Be the first to comment!