Opéra et crime: De la naissance de l’opéra à la fin du XVIII siècle

The author studies the representation in opera of criminal phenomena and of social reactions related to them through a certain number of examples taken from lyric works — operas and oratorios — of the XVIIth and XVIIIth century in Europe. The elements which could have influenced that representation are evoked on that occasion. A few actual and feasible applications are to be envisaged as well the collective level as on the individual one.     

Des paradigmes à l'étio-pathogénie en psychiatrie

A French psychiatrist who died recently, G. Lantéri-Laura described three main paradigms in the evolution of western psychiatry since the eighteenth century : mental alienation, mental diseases and psychopathological structures. We shall outline this author's references to philosophy, history and epistemology in his reflexion about identity, evolution and the development of psychiatry, as clinical science. We shall insist upon his admiration of medical semiology, anatomo-clinical correlations and diagnostic procedures, brilliantly illustrated by the Paris School of Medicine, with Corvisart , Bouillaud, Laënnec and P. Louis in the nineteenth century. We may observe that the contemporaneous authors of the Research Agenda for DSM V, Kupfer, First and Regier criticize sharply the DSM III and IV. They criticize this classification which is blind to the research works about etio-pathogeny of mental diseases and allows a reification of statistically -based syndromes , to the detriment of research outcomes about mental diseases. A wide confrontation of all the research trends in psychiatry, including dynamic psychopathology as well as neuro-sciences, might this be the fourth paradigm of our time ?     

Le fou « nosognosique » sous le regard médical : les lettres d'Eugénie Nogarède adressées au Dr Hans Steck

The writings of patients have always been found interesting by alienists, this since the XIXth century. Publication of texts written in asylums carry the demented's words in his absence, be he alienated, suicidal or a criminal and brings him to the present in which he can be studied. The unedited correspondence of E. Nogarède, written between 1927 and 1951 in her asylum within the framework of her relations with her doctors as well as various scientific publications on the language of the demented, make it possible to underline a number of specific details. On the one hand, a verbal conscience and competence exists which allows the patient to find the words of her derangement (the nosognosia of the demented) and that invents its own language (neologisms). On the other hand, interaction between this awareness of the demented and that of the doctors create a double movement: recognition by the doctor of the patient's literary capacity and the contribution of new clinical elements on the language of the demented, which enriches medical and scientific publications.     

Les psychanalystes et le transfert de pensée : enjeux historiques et actuels

The concept of “thought transference” has a special position within the psychoanalytic field. It is first an object on the sidelines because it originated in the psychical sciences of the late nineteenth century. It is also an object extracted by psychoanalysis to the darkness of the occultism, Freud considering the thought transference as being its true nucleus. But it is also a foreign body because even if it was apprehended by different authors, it remains poorly integrated into the psychoanalytic corpus. In this review of the literature, we try to show how this concept had first played a heuristic role vis-à-vis the theorizing of transference and countertransference. We then see how it was taken over by successive generations of analysts as well as heated debate it engendered, participating to the division of the field of psychotherapy. Finally, we will bring out the relevance of this concept in terms of clinical and current theoretical issues.     

Les attentes du juge d'instruction et du président de la cour d'assises

Forensic psychiatric expertise plays a major role in the pre-sentencing and sentencing phases of the work of two magistrates: it is indispensable for the examining judge, more particularly for criminal cases and important for the president of the assizes court who needs the expert's advice on a person's acting out whether or not the person suffers from a mental disease. In the first phase of examination an expertise of the incriminated person should be held according to the penal code and to the code of penal procedures. It is important to know whether the incriminated person's judgment at the time of acting out was abolished or not, if the expert decides it was, the case may be dropped. This happens in roughly 0,50% of criminal cases and their number has decreased from 444 to 286 between 1987 and 1999. The presidents of assizes courts are surprised that they regularly have to judge persons who are manifestly “limit” cases. In criminal cases examining judges ask for two expertises of the incriminated person: a psychiatric one and a medico-psychological one. Most often it is important that they be by two different experts as two opinions based on different theoretical approaches are preferable. The examining judge needs to understand the acting out whether or not the judgment of the incriminated person was abolished or altered and regardless of responsibility. Each case is then an occasion of working on the problematic of “the meaning of crime”. At the assizes court experts are important for the president and for the jury. A follow up of expertise is often requested namely one held a few weeks before the hearing complementing the initial one so as to update it and to show how the incriminated person has evolved. The president expects the expert's written report and oral presentation to be coherent, his report to be intelligible and to be instructive for the jury. He expects the expert to analyse the meaning of the crime in the subject's history if that person admits having committed the crime and this whether he is a pathological case or not. The president of the assizes court also expects the expert to give his recommendations relative to the possible inter-actions between the different protagonists leading to the crime. The expert's speech is directed to the jurymen. What they expect from justice is that experts enlighten them as clearly and precisely as possible with a pedagogy allowing them to understand the most advanced items whatever their various backgrounds. The specificity of sexual criminology will be developed at the time of the assizes session.     

Politique,psychiatrie et cinéma

The purpose of this study is to show how the psychological mechanisms used to set up a dictatorship are featured by films, by censorship, submission to an absolute leader, collective unconscious and mass behavior. We do not intend to present an exhaustive list of films, but we selected eight representative films to illustrate this study: Four are Italian films, one is a Polish film, one is a French film, and two are German films. It is easy to notice that seven of them are issued from countries having suffered from dictatorial state. And the French film I comme Icare is located in an uncertain country with a political murder and where a putsch is in preparation. The Polish film L’Évasion du cinema “Liberté” represents an ex-censor of the Soviet union going through the screen to have a discussion with the actors. And Le Maître et Marguerite is also a criticism of the censorship. Two Italian films realized by the same communist producer, show the solidarity between the workers in one of them, and the impunity of a criminal police chief on the other one. Another Italian film, Une journée particulière, shows how two people could meet together in 1938 in Roma. These two people were left out of the city life: A man because he was an homosexual, waiting to go the next day in a concentration camp, and a woman because she was expected to be only an housewife and a mother of several children, according to the use in fascist time. We shall detail more extensively two German films, because they are closely similar: L’Expérience points out the artificial gathering of twenty young men living two weeks in a jail. Two groups were selected on computerized data: ten as prisoners and ten as warders. Along the following days, the severity of punishments will increase and leads to a sadism behavior. La Vague shows two issues discussed in a high school about the birth and the increasing way toward a dictatorial state. As for the former film, the evolution overpasses the goal of the teacher, because some of the pupils are getting more and more interested in the experience. When the teacher declares “the experience is over”, some of the pupils refuse with extreme violence. These both films show the evolution of two experiences, adapted from real experiences in American famous universities, whose evolution overpasses the wills of their initiators. They show also how difficult it is to declare the end of the experience as if the participants felt that it was not a game, but as if it was the reality.     

Déjouer le jeu. Réappropriation et détournement de l'univers de jeux vidéo dans la création contemporaine

In the era of cyber culture and collective intelligence, video game establishes itself more and more nearby the artistic disciplines historically settled. Its aesthetics and its way of revisiting the real reveal a new “formal representation” and an increasing number of contemporary artists use it as an expression mean. The spatial development of video games is comparable to contemporary installations; it presents itself as a distinctive space recreated into a public or a domestic dimension. Video games, like installations, intensify the feeling of displacement or ubiquity that any kind of show may provide. The installations using video games mechanism make us pass from the idea of “esthetique relationnelle” introduced by Nicolas Bourriaud to a participative aesthetics where the spectator takes the place of the protagonist. The analyze of different works: “Vigilance 1.0” of Martin Le Chevalier, Kolkoz in “Hong Kong 2002”, “Nekropolis” of Tobias Bernstrup, and “Sam” of Palle Torsson shows some examples of reappropriation and diversion of the video games universe in contemporary art. Those examples allow us to see in a new way the world of video games. The contemporary artists appropriate this form of expression to make new plastic and participative explorations far of from the first play and entertainment finality. In these pieces the role of the spectator in the device is fundamental and it produces a total experience mobilizing at the same time: the vision, the hearing and the touch. The video game represents a post-modern form where contemporary artists may express the idea of “Gesamtkunstwerk” evoked by Richard Wagner in the second half of the XIX century with his theory of the “complete art work piece”. We are witnessing a turning point in the way of experimenting life which consists in interrogating the body into space and time in synaesthesia. Contemporary artist seem indisputably to make their own the Duchamp's words: “the viewers are the ones who make the painting”, the art of work remains unfinished until the spectator hasn't received it, the viewer turns up into an actor in a spectacular dynamics and his relation to the work of art goes beyond a simple passive contemplation.     

L'évolution du concept de mythomanie dans l'histoire de la psychiatrie

During the l9th century, morbid lying and imaginative exuberance are pointed out in several forms of the mental alienation: Intellectual monomania (Esquirol, 1819), hereditary madness (Morel, 1860), megalomania (Dagonet, 1862 and 1876), grandiose delusion (Foville, 1871) — with ideas of filiation — and over all hysterical madness (J. Falret, 1866; Lasègue, 1881). Several historical personages reincarnated (false Joan of Arc, false Louis XVII) have likely suffered from these disorders. For the first time in Germany, Delbrück isolates an autonomous form of pathological lying that he calls “pseudologia fantastica” (1891). The French alienist E. Dupré (1862-1921) describes in 1905 the mythomania and its three forms: 1) vain (fantastic boasting, criminal autoaccusation, malingering); 2) mischievous (hoax, slanderous accusation, anonymous letters); 3) perverse (swindlers, seducers, wandering mythomania). Dating from 1910, Dupré characterizes the delusions based on “imaginative” mechanisms, with grandiose ideas, either chronic (autosuggestion, confabulation), or acute (often symptomatic of delirium, dementia, amnestic or mood disorders). In 1919, he considers mythomania as the basis of hysteria, through its “constitutional” (or “temperamental”) theory of mental disorders. These conceptions are accepted by Delmas and Boll (1922), Heuyer (“délire de rêverie”, 1922), Vinchon (1926) and Dide (1935), but criticized by the pupils of Charcot (Janet), the phenomenologists (K. Schneider) and the “structuralist” school (Ey). Kraepelin's confabulatory and fantastic paraphrenias are compared with Dupré's imaginative delusions by the pupils of H. Claude (Nodet, 1937). But the intuition is separated from the imagination as an autonomous delusional mechanism (1931), whereas Delay (1942) and then Guiraud (1956) distinguish confabulation from mythomania. Since the DSM-III (1980), the word mythomania is no more retained into psychiatric classifications. The clinical entity of Dupré is divided in delusional disorders (grandiose type), facticious disorders, antisocial, narcissistic and borderline personality disorders. On the other hand, pathological lying is nowadays differentiated from malingering, delusions, Ganser's syndrome and confabulation. Its boundaries with histrionic personality disorder are not clear.