German-French Dialogue in the Building of Classical Psychiatry, Berlin 2017 World Congress, Symposium Section History of Psychiatry, World Psychiatric Association (original) (raw)

2017, German-French Dialogue in the Building of Classical Psychiatry, Berlin 2017 World Congress, Symposium Section History of Psychiatry, World Psychiatric Association

Authors: SINZELLE J, SUCH G, CRAUS Y, CHARBIT P, PETERS UH, BERRIOS GE. Pr German E BERRIOS p.3 - Introduction. Pr Dr Uwe Henrik PETERS p.5 - Foreword. Dr Gaetan SUCH p.7 - Dissociation: A “Split” Concept Between French and German Psychiatry. Dr Yann CRAUS p.13 - Following Out the Concept of Paranoia: A Paradigm for Epistemology of Psychiatry. Dr Jérémie SINZELLE p.19 - A Hundred Years of Dementia Praecox: Grandeur and Decay of a Disease of the Will. Dr Patrice CHARBIT p.25 - Political Psychiatry, or Psychiatric Policies? INTRODUCTION Professor German E. Berrios (United Kingdom) (1) (2) (1) Section Chair, History of Psychiatry, WPA. (2) Emeritus Chair of the Epistemology of Psychiatry, Life-Fellow Robinson College, University of Cambridge, UK During the 19th century the construction of Psychiatry (a term of German origin) was due to an interesting combination of French and German views. This dovetailing was made possible by the cultural ferment going on in Europe at the time. Often presented as synonyms, concepts such as discordance, dissociation, Spaltung, splitting, etc. had different conceptual provenance and each Psychiatric culture used differently to explain dissimilar phenomena. For example, there were horizontal and vertical dissociations, functional and structural forms of splitting, etc. etc. This explains their different explanatory functionality as in the case of Freud’s ego theories or Bleuler’s Schizophrenia. The concept of Schizophrenia itself was a major conceptual departure from the Kraepelinian concept of Dementia praecox whose roots can be traced back to both Morel and Pick. The concept of paranoia also underwent conceptual transformation in both German and French psychiatry and the resulting definitional dissimilarities became unresolvable by the 1920s. In the event the concept was replaced by the inane diagnosis of delusional disorder. The four speakers are young French clinicians who carefully studied French and German psychiatry by reading the ancient sources in the original texts. FOREWORD Pr Dr Uwe Henrik Peters, MD, PhD, hc (Germany) (1) (2) (1) Emeritus Chair, Klinik für Psychiatrie, Psychotherapie. Medical College. Universität zu Köln. Germany. (2) Former President. DGPPN, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Nervenheilkunde. Sektion Geschichte der Psychiatrie. This symposium is about classical psychopathology, what means about the pathology of psyche. French as well as German psychiatrists in the past had built up a doctrine how to observe illness signs and structures in a given patient, how to interpret the observations, how to give names to it and how to use it for diagnosing. In our times, when psychiatric brain researchers try to find technical, chemical and physical, possibilities for diagnosing and treating illnesses of the psyche, psychopathology seems to be unnecessary. However for philosophical reasons it is even impossible to reach such a goal of a technological psychiatry, as Thomas Fuchs in Heidelberg has evidenced. In this situation it is necessary to return to classical psychiatry and psychopathology. History in general and history of psychiatry does not repeat itself. Therefore Psychopathology in the future will have to incorporate histories, history of an illness, life history of the person, history of the time and history of the past. Neither American nor British psychiatry own the premises, the preconditions for working out the future psychopathology, but French and German psychiatries do. Since DSM III-V and ICD-10 or -11 in this respect are completely unsatisfying, it will be necessary to build up a new continental European system of mental disturbances. For this it is a good Aristotelian manner of human sciences to in the first step recapitulate the classical past. The papers of this symposium deal exactly with that. The only but important problem, which I see, concerns language. As Harald Weinrich, the only German Professor with chair at the Collège de France, has pointed out, the French-German friendship is a friendship without language. In spite of the fact that this symposium has to be in globalesic English language, it will demonstrate at the same time a new beginning, away from monolingualism but towards plurilingualism.