Sujet politique,sujet psychique. En marge d’un séminaire de psychopathologie historique

A sociologist who cares to know how a society’s political organisation influences the anthropogenesis of individuals will find that the evolution of psychopathological individuals provide a prime vantage point. That evolution shows how pervasive and deeply rooted in society is the psychology of the individual: individuals are unable to escape the social history enveloping their external environments. In this paper, the author underlines that becoming a person in post-modern society, in which socialisation works through extreme individualisation, is a problem: individuals are no longer able to look at themselves from the point of view of the political whole in which they could then find a place. The author argues that new disorders (depression-related fatigue, antisocial violence, aggressive fear of abandonment, hyperkinesis, and others) are signs of failure in personal authonomy. In every case, there is a bipolarity of extreme independence and dependent behaviour. Arguably, these as yet ‘unidentified clinical objects’ can be related to borderline personality disorders, although the latter concept must be re-examined.