The social construction of self and psychiatry: from alienism to the "new psychiatry"

Abstract

In addressing psychiatry's representations of the notion of self, the article endeavors especially to show in what way these representations are an expression of the value individual and of the corollaries equality and freedom. In doing so, it focuses on the emergence of the first psychiatry [alienist] and on a reorganizing, as of World War II, of therapeutic know-ledge and practices, herein designated the new psychiatry. Drawing from a comparative study, the article discusses the physical-moral tension consti-tuent in the social construction of the modern self in its different forms of actualization and analyzes the breaks and continuities between the ideas underpinning alienist psychiatry and the new psychiatry.