Psychiatrist who became a historian of psychiatry breaking with the hagiographical tradition that had prevailed until then, Jacques Postel died on November 25 at the age of 95.
Born in Clermont-Ferrand on 1is January 1927 within a family of the most classic middle class – if the father is a dentist, the mother is a housewife – Jacques Postel begins his medical studies in Nice before defending his doctoral thesis in Lyon devoted to “ the electrical expression of cerebrovascular accidents of traumatic origin” (1955).
If he passed the hospital clinic of the Seine and was appointed head of service at Esquirol, then at Maison-Blanche before Sainte-Anne, where he would practice for a quarter of a century, Postel explored other knowledge, trained in philosophy and to psychoanalysis, through an analysis conducted with René Laforgue (1894-1962). Testimony of an open-mindedness which will be its mark.
Redesign of the look on his discipline
History benefits from this and, in the wake of Michel Foucault’s essay History of Madness in the Classical Age (Plon, 1961), Postel supports the revolution caused by this work in the way of thinking about the history of psychiatry, breaking with the corporatist issues that alienate it to defend the scientific dimension alone capable of reassessing the beginnings of psychiatry in the dawn of the 19th centurye century – will follow the memorable debate on the promotion of the alienist to the detriment of the nurse and the “liberation” madmen where the respective contributions of Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) and the asylum supervisor Jean-Baptiste Pussin (1745-1811) who second him at the Salpêtrière are measured. Although he was the assistant of Daniel Lagache (1903-1972), the first psychoanalyst working at the Sorbonne and a pioneer in the study of psychopathology, Jacques Postel left the Psychoanalytic Association of France (APF) in 1975, which Lagache co-founded a ten years earlier.
Always moved by the desire to overhaul the way we look at his discipline, he joined the editorial board of the prestigious and already venerable journal the following year. Psychiatric Evolution, the first volume of which appeared in 1925 with Payot, the first publisher of Freudian texts. Etienne Trillat (1919-1998) has been its editor-in-chief since 1973 after a long reign – twenty-seven years! – by Henri Ey (1900-1977), whose beautiful dream of making one “a place of synthesis where differences and antagonisms rub shoulders without rejecting each other” may have fostered a self-harm harmful to critical thinking. Trillat who will synthesize his work in his History of hysteria (Seghers, 1986), builds on the Birth of the clinic. An archeology of the medical gaze by Michel Foucault (PUF, 1963) and warmly welcomes Jacques Postel like Georges Lantéri-Laura (1930-2004), the epistemology of the discipline integrating, in addition to history, linguistics and phenomenology.
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