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GABRIEL MOYAL–SCIENTIFIC TRANSLATION IN THE 19 TH CENTURY: P. PINEL
the text itself, a text written principally in one language and intended for a more or less
well defined linguistic and cultural audience.
But what of this “act of trust”? What sense can it make to grant that there is
meaning where the other appears at once to reject sense and coherence, when the other
has come to be defined by an absence of reason?
This, in effect, is the substance of Pinel’s wager about the insane. And, broadly
speaking, Pinel’s “investment of belief” relates to translation in at least three ways. Firstly
in the most common sense: Pinel (1745-1826) translated into French the writings of some
of the English and Italian “alienists”, of those practitioners who preceded him in
attempting to treat and even cure insanity. Often referred to as “charlatans”, these were
generally unscientific, non-medically trained practitioners who had dealt with relative
measures of success with the insane and had sometimes published books and manuals
about their work. Secondly, he attempted to transcribe into standardized medical method
the intuitions of apparently gifted men who seemed able to reach the insane, to
communicate with them somewhere beyond their ravings and often despite their
menacing violence. Thirdly, and most importantly, Pinel himself felt sure that the ravings
of the “maniaques” in his charge were only apparently nonsensical, that ultimately their
delirium was a temporary phenomenon. For him, a reasonable discourse was struggling
persistently to make itself heard beneath the insane’s ravings. Reaching the rational being
beneath the symptoms involved breaking down the code of the distortions her/his
discourse and comportment were undergoing before reaching expression or gesture.
Pinel’s faith that sense was somehow still to be found, or at least, that some form of
communication could be established with the insane is unquestionably an essential
preliminary step to modern psychiatric practice.
In his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften… Hegel pays homage to Pinel
precisely for this. What Hegel emphasizes about the “traitement moral” developed by Pinel
is the implicit assumption that Reason is not lost in insanity, it is simply obscured by a
partial contradiction – just as in Physical disease health is not totally lost (as that would
mean death), rather it suffers a partial malfunction, a localized contradiction within its
design. Hegel calls this a derangement, “Verrücktheit” (Hegel: 179).
For us, Pinel’s decision to engage in dialogue with the insane needs to be read as
the initial step in the humanist tradition of psychiatry, a tradition which finds its
culmination in Freud’s “talking cure”. That is to say that Pinel’s faith needs to be
understood as a perspective which does not look upon insanity – or, more generally, on
manifestations of psychopathology – as irretrievably alien but rather as accidental
dysfunctions to which all human subjects are susceptible, where and when given
circumstances obtain. Indeed, one would argue that the “dialogue with the insane” 1
initiated by Pinel orients the attention of psychiatric science towards a comparative
interpretation of the linguistic and semiotic symptoms of insanity and away from – as had
been the case until then – an exclusively physiological account.
1
The expression is borrowed from the title of Gladys Swain (and Marcel Gauchet) excellent book: Dialogue avec
l’insensé (1994).
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