Culture et sémiologie psychiatrique

The author examines the problem of the relationship between mental disorders and the cultural diversity but limits his investigation by introducing two restrictive elements. Firstly, he does not consider the entire range of mental illnesses; and he only takes into account the French and German medical psychiatric tradition, which he examines from their origins in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Secondly, from a synchronic point of view, he does not take into account the diversity of existent cultures apart from those of western Europe and North America; he then considers western culture from its hellenistic and roman origins until the end of the twentieth century as a diachronic continuity with origins in the hippocratic corpus, which then traverses antiquity, followed by the byzantine, jewish, and arab civilizations of the middle ages, the renaissance, the classical period, the century of light and the positivist era. The author then studies the relationship between rational thought and apparently supernatural concepts through an examination of medicine and mental states in antiquity: he quotes as examples the insanity of Ajax or Heracles; then later on in history examines the development of thaumaturgic power supposedly held by the kings of France, from Robert the pious to the unfortunate Louis XVI. He then refers to modern semiology psychiatry, and with the concept of “primary signs”, the extent to which it has rid itself of cultural dependence.