Etienne-Jean Georget French psychiatrist Country: France

1. Biography of Étienne-Jean Georget
2. Contributions to Psychiatry
3. Impact on Art and Literature
4. Understanding Mental Illness

Biography of Étienne-Jean Georget

Étienne-Jean Georget was a French psychiatrist and specialist in monomanias. He was born in Vernon-sur-Brène and studied medicine in Tours. In 1816, he moved to Paris and began working at the Salpêtrière Hospital. There, he studied under and assisted Philippe Pinel, as well as served as an assistant to Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol.

Contributions to Psychiatry

Georget specialized in the study of psychopathology and made revisions to Pinel's nosology of mental disorders, bringing more clarity and precision to it. He coined several types of monomanias, including "theomania" (religious obsession), "erotomania," "demonomania" (demon possession), and the concept of "homicide monomania," which examined senseless murders. He viewed mania, more closely than Esquirol, as what we now understand as "maniac." His work in this area was remarkable.

Georget even suggested that judges consider the mental state of defendants in cases such as the famous "vampire-winegrower" case in 1825, and other similarly senseless murders, and place them in asylums. Defending such individuals was considered revolutionary at the time, given the societal context of the era.

Impact on Art and Literature

In the early 1820s, Georget commissioned artist Théodore Géricault to create a series of portraits of mentally ill individuals so that his students could study the facial features of "monomaniacs." Between 1821 and 1824, Géricault painted 10 portraits of mentally ill individuals, including a child abductor, a kleptomaniac, a gambling addict, and a woman consumed by envy. This collaboration between Géricault and Georget influenced influential Romantic writers such as Musset, George Sand, and Balzac, as well as musicians like Berlioz, to incorporate psychopathology into their works of art and autobiographical compositions.

Understanding Mental Illness

In his work "De la folie" (Treatise on Madness) published in 1820, Georget stated that the complication of all psychoses with paralysis (which Esquirol had previously observed) had an absolutely unfavorable prognostic value. This was one of the earliest references to progressive paralysis. However, Georget believed that mental illnesses were located in the brain, but could also be significantly influenced by abstract "moral deficiencies". Whether they occurred depended on moral shortcomings, but later on, the disease itself was recognized as an independent condition affecting the brain. Georget was a pioneer in psychosomatics, just like Bichat. However, his followers would focus more on the origin of mental illnesses as brain diseases, leaving moral causes aside.

Being inspired by Bichat's anatomical studies of the insane and searching for a correlation between pathological-anatomical and psychopathological manifestations, Georget emphasized that a thorough understanding of psychiatry involved recognizing that mental disorders were the result of organic diseases. He believed that acute delirium was symptomatic of both intellect and brain impairment, contrasting with Esquirol's view that perception was affected during delirium. The lack of coordination between abstract thinking and delirium led to hallucinations, usually visual ones. Therefore, Georget's ideas were profound for metaphysical psychiatry.

In 1821, Georget wrote a two-volume course on the study of brain physiology and the nervous system, including a significant section on hysteria.