“From the beginning of my studies, I considered the progressive inner desiccation that medical thinking induced as though it were a symptom to be concealed. If at first I had been keen to master its knowledge and methods, I felt there was a tendency in medicine to systematize a kind of reasoning that threatened to extinguish the irreducible mystery one might want to interrogate when faced with a body going haywire, with madness, or when confronting the fate of a sick individual. I sometimes even had the impression that in depriving me of that, it was undoing me …”
Read the full text here at Socrates on the Beach
Patrick Autréaux was born in 1968. He practiced emergency psychiatry until 2006. Author of a dozen books and numerous articles on art and literature, he lives between Paris and Cambridge, USA.
First written in 2020 for a conference on the medical humanities and narrative medicine, lead by Rita Charon (Columbia University), ‘Une École Buissonnière’ was published by AOC, and later by the Revue Médecine et Philosophie (n°5, 2021).