Bulletin of YRIDEI

Against the premise shared by Foucault and his positivist critics — that psychiatry was born with the conquest of an objective gaze upon madness — Gladys Swain’s philological distinction between the two editions of Pinel’s Traité (an IX / 1809) discloses a third position: what arrived with Pinel was the apparatus of the subject of madness. The chapter follows the argument through Foucault’s defective citation, moral treatment and manie sans délire, the negative constitution of psychiatry’s object in the Nosographie, Hegel’s ratification of 1817, and Esquirol’s contraction — and reconstructs Henri Ey’s account of origins, from the “spark” of 1948 to the 1971 critique of Foucault, as a triple structure essentially isomorphic with Swain’s position. Condensed from the Japanese original (55 notes and two companion reader’s guides remain in Japanese).

An integrated English version of two Japanese articles, rebuilt on the primary sources. Half a century after the Revolution abolished the lettre de cachet and prescribed judicial examination for those detained as mad, the July Monarchy created a permanent regime of confinement that bypassed the judge entirely. The judicial barrier is reconstructed not from Castel but from Esquirol’s own pamphlet of 1838 — where magistrates faithful to the letter of the Code are described sending the insane to prison while the interdiction ran its course — and from a footnote of Georget’s of 1825 showing that confinement without interdiction was already the ordinary case. The debate of April 1837 is then read as a contest between two incompatible revolutionary legacies, a police one and a judicial one, in which Isambert named the coming regime, at the moment of its creation, “an interdiction in miniature, less the guarantees required by the Civil Code.” Against this, the demand for confinement is located in the defensive limit of the peasant household. Castel’s thesis of a second status of tutelle is treated throughout as a claim to be tested rather than a framework to be applied; the figure of twenty-nine interdictions, repeated on his authority for fifty years, is traced to a parliamentary speech of 1838 and withdrawn as evidence.

The confrontation between Pinel and Couthon at Bicêtre did not happen; this paper asks instead how it acquired and then defended its authority. Pinel’s own account of 1809 credits the surveillant Pussin and dates the unchaining to 4 prairial an VI — May 1798, four years after Couthon’s execution and three years after Pinel had left the establishment: the scene requires in one room a man who had left the building and a man who had been guillotined. Three stages are then traced through the writings of Pinel’s own family. Invention (1836): Scipion composes the dialogue and claims his father’s notes as warrant. Canonization (1888): René Semelaigne reproduces it as continuous history in his inaugural thesis, giving Couthon an office he never held — six years earlier than the work to which the fixing of the scene is usually credited. Immunization (1912): the same author attributes the scene to Scipion, silently corrects the office, records the objection that Couthon never came to Bicêtre, and disarms it by declaring the point of “very slight importance” beside Pinel’s will — the moment, datable and attributable, at which a legend acquires an immune system. A closing section records the legend’s arithmetic, which drifts from forty freed prisoners in 1809 to eighty in 1838.

Gladys Swain (1945–1993) is the French psychiatrist whose work reshaped the historiography of psychiatry after Foucault’s Histoire de la folie; biographical literature on her is nearly nonexistent in any language, and in English there has been none at all. Drawing chiefly on the two prefaces Marcel Gauchet set before her posthumous works, the paper sketches her life, documents the genealogy in which her work stands — Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Aron crossing in Claude Lefort and descending through Gauchet to Swain’s article in the first issue of Libre (1977) — and gives an account of her reception.

Paper I of a two-paper study. Bleuler is, in English as in Japanese, effectively a one-book author: the 1911 monograph is read, the Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie and the late psychobiology are not. Henri Ey insisted the system stood in the later books — and then admitted, in a footnote to his own 1940 lecture, that he had not treated the textbook. This paper takes up what Ey left undone, reading chapter A of the third edition (1920) against the corresponding chapter of Kraepelin’s sixth (1899): Kraepelin asks what is observed, Bleuler why it occurs. It then argues that the loosening of associations cannot be understood within the associationist tradition to which it is conventionally assigned. Association descends from Aristotle along two incompatible lines — through Locke and Hume to Wundt, where associations are acquired; and through Kant, Herbart and Griesinger, where the capacity for connection is structural — and only the second permits the inference Bleuler actually drew, from loosened associations to a cerebral process. Read on that ground, Schneider’s dismissal of the fundamental symptoms is not a refutation but a change of level.

Paper II of a two-paper study. In the summer of 1925 Henri Ey shut himself up in an empty family house in the Pyrenees and translated Bleuler’s Dementia praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien; his version circulated only as a mimeograph from 1945. What French psychiatry made of Bleuler was not faithful transmission but a double creative transformation: Minkowski read autism toward Bergson’s lived time, Ey read one sentence — the cradle of many delusional ideas is the acute states — toward Hughlings Jackson’s dissolution, and drew from the primary/secondary distinction a principle of the organo-clinical gap. The confrontation with Henri Claude at Geneva–Lausanne in 1926 is read afresh from the L’Harmattan reprint, which preserves the discussion in full; the lineage is then followed through Bonneval, the refusal of Lacan, the early use of chlorpromazine, the Manuel de Psychiatrie, and chapter 27 of Kapsambelis, which names Bleuler (1911) as source and “Henri Ey (1996) and the French school” as the route of transmission. The price was the phenomenological standing of primary delusion; the gain is legible in ICD-11.

In a lecture of 1940 Henri Ey gave an extended account of Bleuler’s Naturgeschichte der Seele (1921), conceding that its psychology “remains essentially atomistic, associationist” and yet concluding that “Bleuler’s monism is nevertheless of a distinctly dynamist character.” He adds that Jaspers’s severe analysis of the work is well known — but Jaspers’s criticism is directed on its face at Die Psychoïde (1925). Is the book Ey praised the same book Jaspers attacked? This commentary, the third of the Bleuler papers, reads the 1921 text section by section to answer the question the main article left standing.

Paper I of a two-paper study. Returning to the German text of Schneider’s Klinische Psychopathologie (14th ed.), the paper argues that the core of Schneiderian psychopathology was never a checklist but a methodological attitude inscribed in the grammar itself: essentialist readings of the first-rank symptoms held off in the Konjunktiv II, the working rules of diagnosis declared in the indicative. The subjunctive reservation governs Schneider’s hierarchy of the three forms of delusion — delusional perception alone first-rank, alone sustaining the indicative immer — and the untranslated editions of Huber and Gross’s Psychiatrie (1976; 2005) show the German orthodoxy preserving the entire structure into the twenty-first century. An appendix records a Japanese translators’ controversy, with soundings taken directly from Blankenburg and Huber, documented in no other language.

Paper II. Using the instrument derived in the companion paper, the DSM’s reception of Schneider is reconstructed as three transformations: the stripping of the Konjunktiv II reservation in DSM-III; the three-layer re-editing of the eight first-rank symptoms, with Gedankenlautwerden and Wahnwahrnehmung — the symptom Schneider trusted with his only indicative immer — omitted from every edition; and DSM-5’s perceptual-intensity requirement for hallucination, which the German original’s nicht vergleichbar expressly holds off. The reliability-first paradigm behind all three is re-examined as a false dichotomy, on the empirical record of the Copenhagen school and the German basic-symptom tradition; a closing synthesis reads the 2024 Moritz survey — four in five experts against the current hallucination definition — and asks what restoration in DSM-6 would have to mean.

Paper I of the two-paper abridged English edition of An Essay on Shamanism. A compact review that replaces the label “shamanism” with a coordinate system: Eliade’s technique of ecstasy defended as a Weberian ideal type; Campbell’s hunting–planting dichotomy decomposed into levels of description; Lewis’s central and peripheral possession as the second axis; the plane tested on the Greek material of Dodds; Jaspers’s distinction of state and office; and Henri Ey’s untranslated shaman essay, from the “sick shaman” controversy to the healing office and ICD-11.

Paper II of the two-paper abridged English edition. The two shaman-queens are located on the coordinate plane: Jingū’s oracle as possession-type and peripheral, Himiko’s kidō as possession-type and central — the institutionalization of central possession as the ritual core of a sacral kingship. The function axis converts the systematic inversion of Himiko in the figure of Jingū into a verdict of design; the same coordinates then describe the later Japanese transformations of shamanism, from the bifurcated miko, Sumiyoshi and kagura to Shugendō and Noh; and against Ey’s criterion both queens emerge as oracular specializations without healing.

Henri Ey worked until shortly before his death in 1977 on a history of the origins of medicine; edited by Henri Maurel, it appeared posthumously as Naissance de la médecine (1981). The book contains a sustained twenty-page treatment of the shaman — never translated, and little read even in French; Ey himself remains almost entirely untranslated into English. This paper presents that text as a whole and examines it critically: the central thesis that the magico-animistic world has no category of “disease” but only Mal, so that shamanism stands outside medicine as ante-medicine and anti-medicine at once; the thaumaturgic trance read as “like a dream” on the coordinates of Ey’s organo-dynamic theory; the 1860–1970 “sick shaman” controversy and its normative refutation, converging with the cultural-exception clauses of the ICD-11 CDDR; the five cultural-area models and Durkheim’s silence; and a critical assessment from today’s standpoint. With An Outline of Shamanism and The Two Shaman-Queens of Early Japan it completes a trilogy.

In the essay on music in Either/Or, Kierkegaard called Mozart’s Don Giovanni a work of genius among works of genius. Why did the philosopher who would later write that anxiety is “the dizziness of freedom” love, to this degree, the story of a man who knows not the least particle of anxiety? Collating the Japanese translation from the Danish original with Hannay’s and the Hongs’ English versions, Hirsch’s German edition and the French complete works, this essay takes that question as its entrance and considers, from a psychiatrist’s standpoint, what manner of being it is that has no spirit: Don Giovanni as the incarnation of the sensuousness that Christian spirituality itself cast out; a figure who cannot be expressed in language but only in music; a desire that has no object and lives an eternal present. Against this phantom of immediacy, anxiety appears at the close not as an enemy to be driven out but as a gift — the ground of spirit that supports the self’s being a self.