The next Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions work in progress seminar will take place on Wednesday 15 June. Eva Yampolsky (IUHMSP, University of Lausanne and Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris) will give a paper titled: ‘The pathology of suicide: a historical study of doctrines and practice in 19th-century France’.

Abstract:

At the turn of the 19^th century, with the birth of modern psychiatry and the penal transformations in France, medicine begins to redefine suicide and perversions as pathologies. I will focus here on the relationship between psychopathology and morality. Working specifically on French psychiatric texts, this ambivalent relationship becomes particularly evident in the language itself. While French etiological studies of insanity distinguish between le moral and la morale, a closer look at these studies reveals the ambiguity of these two concepts. I will try to show that the theorization of suicide and perversions as medical objects reposes on this conceptual ambiguity in the French psychiatric discourse, between the psychological faculties of the mind [le moral] and morality and social values [la morale]. Indeed, the shift from a juridical or a religious crime to a pathology is facilitated by this interiorization and embodiment of moral values. I will examine how morality as a group of social rules and values operates within medical theories on the mind. I will then show how this influence of morality on psychiatric theories allowed psychiatry to “appropriate” and redefine an entire spectrum of deviant behaviors.