Psychiatrist and historian Jacques Postel died

Psychiatrist-turned-historian-of-psychiatry, breaking with the hagiographic tradition that had hitherto prevailed, Jacques Postel died on November 25 at the age of 95.

Born in Clermont-Ferrand 1^Eh January 1927 In the most classic middle-class family – if the father is a dentist, the mother is a housewife – Jacques Postel begins his medical studies in Nice, before defending his doctoral thesis in Lyon, devoted to the “electrical expression of cerebrovascular accidents”. Traumatic Origins’ (1955).

If he passed the hospital clinic of Seine and was appointed chief of staff at Esquirol, then at Maison-Blanche before Saint-Anne, where he worked for a quarter of a century, Postel explored other knowledge, studying philosophy and psychoanalysis. Through an analysis with René LaForge (1894-1962). A testimony to the open mind that would be his mark.

A redesign of the look on its discipline

History benefits from this and follows in the footsteps of Michel Foucault’s essay A History of Madness in the Classical Age (Plon, 1961), Postel advocates the revolution caused by this work in the way of thinking about the history of psychiatry, breaking away from the corporate issues that keep it away in favor of a purely scientific dimension that can look at the dawn of the beginning of psychiatry. in the 19th century^e century – followed by a memorable debate about the promotion of an alien to the detriment of nursing and nursing. “liberation” The Mad, which assesses the respective contributions of Philippe Pinelli (1745-1826) and the asylum superintendent Jean-Baptiste Poussin (1745-1811), who make it a second time at the Salpétrière. Although he was an assistant to Daniel Lagache (1903-1972), the first psychoanalyst to work at the Sorbonne and a pioneer in the study of psychopathology, Jacques Postel left the French Psychoanalytic Association (APF), which Lagache founded, in 1975. ten years earlier.

Always motivated to rethink how we view his discipline, he joined the prestigious and already respected journal’s editorial board the following year. psychiatric evolution, the first volume of which was published in 1925 with Payot, the first publisher of Freud’s texts. Etienne Trillat (1919-1998) has been its editor-in-chief since 1973 after a long reign – twenty-seven years! – Henry Ace (1900-1977), whose beautiful dream is to create it “A place of synthesis where differences and antagonisms cancel each other out” May have contributed to self-harm, which is detrimental to critical thinking. Trilat, who synthesizes his work in his A history of hysteria (Seghers, 1986), based on The birth of the clinic. The Archeology of the Medical Gaze by Michel Foucault (PUF, 1963) and warmly welcomes Jacques Postel, like Georges Lantery-Laura (1930-2004), a discipline epistemology that combines history, linguistics and phenomenology.