Le psychiatre fou : Le grand renversement antipsychiatrique
The Crazy Psychiatrist: the Big Antipsychiatric Reversal

Summary/Abstract: The study of the crazy psychiatrist character in fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe to the literature of the 80s, discloses the main criticised aspects of psychiatry: violence of the therapy, deprivation of freedom, uncertainty and relativism of nosology. The different occurrences of this type of fictional character, beginning as early as the 19th century, have been taken into account, as they foreshadow the advent of the antipsychiatric movement of the 60s. By studying the work of the Portuguese António Lobo Antunes’s – a psychiatrist himself – we get an interesting perspective on the nature of these attacks.Moreover, inherited from the Mad Scientist, the character of the crazy psychiatrist subverts the scientific discourse. The grotesque of the character lies mostly in its pretension to define and classify humans. His becoming crazy also reveals the power of Madness as a savage, protean and highly viral force that its creator can explore in search for a poetic and primal language.

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