Histoire et structure dans la connaissance de l'homme

Abstract

A la mémoire de M. Merleau-Ponty.Si, en écrivant au milieu de notre xxe siècle, nous nous trouvons soucieux d'élucider l'acception et la fortune de ce terme de structure, et son opposition aux mots de genèse et d'histoire, c'est dans la mesure où nous avons de plus en plus l'impression et le sentiment que ce vocable de structure s'emploie de nos jours dans toutes sortes de sens et s'attribue sans façon à je ne ne sais combien d'objets, et l'éditeur moderne de la « Physiologie du goût » de Brillât-Savarin imagine ironiquement et à juste titre la locution de gastronomie structurale, qui renvoie d'ailleurs à un autre livre, non moins structuraliste, et qui traite, avec le génie que l'on sait, du cru et du cuit, pour ne rien dire de l'opposition pertinente du bouilli et du rôti. Cet humour et cette mauvaise humeur se motivent de façon bien ambiguë, car ils connaissent une double origine que nous ne devons pas unifier trop tôt.

The erudite humility of the historian: the ‘critical epistemology’ of Georges Lantéri-Laura

“…That is to say, he had promoted a dialogue between psychology as a specific knowledge ( savoir ) – with all the elements that constitute it as a ‘discipline’ – and philosophy in the form of an epistemological questioning of such a constitution. It is from this perspective that I would like to introduce the reflections of Georges Lantéri-Laura, whose historical inquiry is focused closely on the conditions of possibility of psychiatry as a science ( savoir / connaissance ) – as shown by the title of one of his epistemological works: Psychiatrie et connaissance (Lantéri-Laura, 1991b).…”

“…Trained in the school of phenomenological psychopathology, to which he devoted several studies (including two monographs) 9 in the 1950s and 1960s, Lantéri-Laura contributed to the fields of history and epistemology of psychiatry an impressive scientific production. 10 Besides editing several classics of European psychiatry (Jean-Pierre Falret, Philippe Chaslin, Emil Kraepelin), his works cover: the history of concepts – perversion, hallucination, delusion, discordance, chronicity (Lantéri-Laura, 1979, 1991a, 1997); the history of studies on brain functions (Lantéri-Laura, 1970/1993, 1987, 1999; see also Hécaen and Lantéri-Laura, 1977, 1983); 11 and the epistemological problematization of the historiography of psychiatry, especially with respect to the history of medicine, a discipline whose scientific status he investigated through the analysis of both its theoretical and institutional changes (Lantéri-Laura, 1991b, 1994, 1998, 2005).…”

“…At the beginning of the 1990s, the French psychiatrist and historian of psychiatry Georges Lantéri-Laura (1930–2004) noted that ‘despite the ancient and modern works of great interest, the history of psychiatry as well as the need for erudition in several of its domains remain as a task to be accomplished’ (Lantéri-Laura, 1991b: 18). 1 This remark expressed an explicit dissatisfaction with the wide philosophical and sociological models that had characterized the majority of the French histories of psychiatry published by then.…”

“…Although Michel Foucault’s seminal work Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Foucault, 1961/2006b, 1972) is not explicitly mentioned, it is quite clear that the criticisms expressed by Lantéri-Laura take Foucault’s approach as the main example of this kind of global history of psychiatry that philosophically ‘invokes the cunning of reason and the power of the negative’ (Lantéri-Laura, 1991b: 13). In fact, dealing with Foucault’s theses – in order to either develop or criticize them – has been an essential necessary step for French historians of psychiatry since the late 1970s; this is clear in the main works published by Robert Castel (1990), Gladys Swain (1977), Marcel Gauchet and Swain (1980) and Jacques Postel (1981).…”

Courting the Cerebellum: Early Organological and Phrenological Views of Sexuality

“…In an otherwise judicious book on Gall's work and its French context, the historian Lanteri-Laura passes with some evident embarrassment over the function of the cerebellum. 51 In the standard textbook on The Physiology and Pathology of the Cerebellum (1958), Robert Dow and Giuseppe Moruzzi write that 'It is hard to believe that Gall's hypothesis regarding the cerebellum as a centre for sexual activity could have been published in 1825 when the works of Rolando, Flourens, Fodera…”