We recount how Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840) gradually changed his position towards what Philipe Pinel (1745-1826) referred to as mania without delusion. Between 1805 and 1838, Esquirol moved from outright rejection, questioning the very idea of insane persons committing motiveless acts of violence without delusion, to relative acceptance. He eventually incorporated the clinical characteristics of mania without delusion in his description of homicidal monomania, dividing them between reasoning monomania and instinctive monomania. We examine this change by detailing each of Esquirol's points of disagreement, which decreased sharply between the completion of his thesis in 1805 and the publication of his chapter on homicidal monomania in 1838.
L’auteur se propose d’examiner la genèse et l’évolution de la clinique freudienne de l’entrée dans la psychose, à partir des observations contenues dans le corpus freudien. Il retrace le parcours conceptuel du fondateur de la psychanalyse, de ses premiers textes sur les psychonévroses (1894) à ses articles afférents à la seconde topique dans les années 20. Il en ressort que Freud situe essentiellement ses recherches dans le champ des psychoses paranoïaques. Malgré son incessante volonté et ses nombreuses propositions spéculatives, Freud ne parvient pas à dégager le mécanisme spécifique de la psychose et de son éclosion.
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