Le cœur de la folie : Brève histoire d’une métaphore en médecine

Could madness be rooted in the “heart”? This question has accompanied psychiatry from its birth around 1800 to the dawn of the twentieth century, throughout the turning points in its history, marked by a tension between psychologism and organicism. The “heart” of madmen, metaphorical or not, always based in a physiology of emotions, was thus the object of speculative or statistic approaches that obstinately aimed to confer a medical status upon it. The poor success of these attempts, or their outright failures, highlight the energy that psychiatrists applied to recalling or renewing them.