The Spirit of Psychiatry in Interwar France

In this talk, I address the cultural and intellectual contexts of psychiatry in interwar France, especially in the work of Eugène Minkowski and Pierre Janet. Their respective accounts of the phenomenological dimension internal to morbid psychological states was not limited to clinical inquiry but instead, I argue, participated in a broader spiritualist movement across Christian and Republican politics. Scientific thinkers pressed spiritualism into the service of a viable psychiatric method while simultaneously ensuring the resilience of France’s distinct metaphysical heritage on the eve of the Second World War. Recent scholars have explored the place of spiritualism in philosophy and theology, but my talk sheds new light on spiritualists’ contributions to the natural and human sciences at a time when French intellectuals sought to reconceptualize the bounds and rights of the human.