Paradigmes de l’âme: littérature et aliénisme au XIXe siècle edited by Jean-Louis Cabanès, Didier Philippot and Paolo Tortonese (review)

This volume, based on conference proceedings, surveys the shifting relationship between literary discourses and the emerging psychological and psychiatric sciences in nineteenth-century France. It contributes to a wider tendency across the humanities to explore historical paradigms for thinking about the mind in pre-Freudian contexts. Key concepts structuring discourse about the mind in the period included image and imagination, widely discussed in relation to dreams, hallucination, and madness; and recurrent binary oppositions such as normal/pathological, mind/body, and voluntary/involuntary. Significant ideological tensions arose between spiritualists, vitalists, and writers influenced by Romantic theories of creativity, in the one instance, and positivists and naturalists in the other, with their disenchanted ‘diagnoses’ of pathological individuals past and present. Didier Philippot’s introduction helpfully outlines some of the major theoretical paradigms of the period. The first of the three sections uses the methods of intellectual history to illuminate topics such as automatic behaviour and the notion of the involuntary; the latter was considerably more significant at this time than the notion of the unconscious, as Jacqueline Carroy and Régine Plas argue. Nicole Edelman explores the related topic of somnambulism with reference to the poignant case history of an abused female aristocrat, and the interpretative struggles for hegemony over the soul between disciplines including religion, science, and philosophy are analysed by Sophie Houdard and by Nathalie Richard. The second section, more methodologically experimental, considers the ‘jeu d’interactions, d’échanges, de passages’ (p. 15) between literary and medical discourses, ranging from the term ‘monomania’, which rapidly infiltrated literary discourse (Roselyne de Villeneuve), to the creative imagination in fantastic literature, alienism, and early naturalism (Jean-Louis Cabanès), depictions of decapitation (Bertrand Marquer), and the rhetoric of pathology in funerary discourse (Martine Lavaud). The final section is more traditionally literary in focus, drawing on medical sources and parallels to enrich discussions of Flaubert’s notion of ‘le débordement de l’âme’ (Juliette Azoulai), Maupassant’s explorations of ‘le parasitisme mental’ (Sandra Janssen), involuntary confessions and hysteria in Zola (Sophie Ménard and Pierluigi Pellini respectively), and dreams in Proust’s fiction (Mireille Naturel). Paolo Tortonese concludes by reflecting on the concept of continuity in relation to the normal/pathological distinction. Although the essays vary considerably in topic and approach, their quality is generally good. With a few notable exceptions, the gendered dimensions of these topics remain underexplored. This is disappointing given that assumptions about sex and gender significantly influenced French medical conceptions of the pathological, and that the rhetoric of literary creation from Romantic poetry to naturalist fiction was also heavily gendered. The chronological coverage is rather uneven: the third section is almost exclusively concerned with realist and naturalist authors, despite the ideological significance ascribed to Romanticism in the introduction. The collection thus raises questions about how other authors, movements, and topics might fit into the paradigms broadly outlined. Nonetheless, these reflections will be relevant to both literary scholars and cultural historians, and signal a welcome methodological shift towards a more imaginative form of interdisciplinarity that goes beyond the hunt for sources and influences.