The clinics of subjectivity

Abstract

This article reviews the project of capturing, describing and cataloging subjective experiences as the constitutive and founding
event of psychiatric knowledge. To substantiate this view, it provides first a look at the origins (and problems) of psychiatric semiology in the pioneering work of Philippe Pinel. Afterwards, it describes some of the resources used by his successors in order to gain access to the madman’s inner world, expose the folds of his intimacy and enhance the scope of the psychopathological gaze and the semiological repertoire of psychological medicine. And finally it discusses the contraposition between the practice of the gaze and the practice of listening carried out by psychiatrists as a significant correlate of an epistemic culture obsessed with gaze, but whose very eagerness to take the human being as an object of inquiry in its double physical and moral condition doomed it to cultivate listening.