La perversion du suicide, entre la pathologie et la morale

At the turn of the 19th century, with the birth of modern psychiatry and the penal transformations in France, medicine begins to address suicide and perversions in terms of pathology. According to my hypothesis, the theorization of these pathologies reposes on a conceptual ambiguity that plays a defining role in the psychiatric discourse, and which I would like to analyze here. Indeed, as many medical treatises reveal, this shift from a juridical or religious crime to the medical field depends on a certain confusion between morality [la morale], or social values, and le moral, or intellectual and psychological functions. I would thus like to show how morality as a group of social rules and values operates within medical theories on morals [le moral], or psychological functions. I will then show how this influence of morality on psychiatric theories allowed psychiatry to appropriate and redefine an entire spectrum of deviant behaviors, which had up until then remained outside of the parameters of pathology.