"'The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon'" Topic
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Tango01 | 03 May 2017 3:22 p.m. PST |
"At a time when the mental stability of US president Donald Trump is openly debated by psychiatrists and psychologists, it is timely to remind people that this speculation by doctors on how contemporary politics is influenced by states of mind is not new.[1] Unlike the current state of affairs, however, medical speculations reviewed here focused almost entirely on the mental stability of common people and their political impact on society, rather than on the impact of the head of state's mental health. In this book, originally published in France in 2011, Laure Murat has produced an insightful account of how politics and madness infused each other with meanings beyond pathological labels of "delusions of grandeur," a term so often bandied about regarding people who claim status as a "great" man or woman. In doing so, she relies extensively on the patient records of institutions in and around the Paris area between the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the aftermath of the violent suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. For the years in between, Murat has uncovered a treasure trove of primary sources that speak to mad people's identification with, or fear of, the tumultuous political upheavals that crisscrossed France from the overthrow of the Ancien Régime to the rise and fall of Napoleon to the Bourbon Restoration and its subsequent overthrow in 1830 with the installation of the liberal July Monarchy under Louis-Philippe. The latter was in turn deposed by the Revolution of 1848, only to be superseded by Napoleon III's 1851 coup, his subsequent two-decade dictatorship and ultimate defeat at the hands of the Prussians in 1870, followed by the short-lived proletarian revolution in Paris the following year. With this whirlwind of intense social and political turmoil overturning French society at regular intervals over an eighty-year period, it is not surprising that some people's sense of self-identity was upended to the point that they identified with some of the leading figures of the day, particularly those who were viewed as bringing prestige and glory to their country, Napoleon I being the most obvious example of all. What Laure sets out to do is to ask how politics and madness were intertwined at a time of immense upheaval and how this affected both expressions of madness and diagnostic labels: "What does madness make of history, and how, in turn, were nosologies contrived or discarded as a function of change in regime?" (p. 4). Related to this, Murat asks, "What does madness have to say about politics?" (p. 9). In seeking to answer these questions, she focuses on Paris and four of its nearby asylums whose archival records she spent three years scouring. The three oldest asylums, Charenton, Bicêtre, and La Salpêtrière, operated during the Revolution and subsequent decades, except for being briefly closed during the Franco-Prussian War. Sainte-Anne, which opened just four years before the Paris Commune, was where many of its supporters ended up in 1871 when the older facilities were temporarily shut down. This period of tumult also witnessed the rise of psychiatry as a profession in France, with its subsequent increasing influence as part of the medical and state apparatus. Murat, however, is clear that she does not identify as a critic of psychiatry along the lines of Michel Foucault, whose criticism she equates with antipsychiatry. Instead, she argues that the purpose of her analysis is to understand the milieu in which mad people saw themselves as the emperor demanding respect from all around them, or as revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the existing order, and how this in turn was pathologized by psychiatrists in collusion with the state as a medical condition worthy of confinement in an insane asylum…" Main page link Amicalement Armand
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