From Neurology to Psychoanalysis: Evolutions and Continuity of the Psychotherapeutic Care Model of the Sanatorium Prévost
Since its opening, in July 1919, Dr. Albert Prévost’s sanatorium tried to stand out from others’ health care institutions, by offering a therapeutic mainly based on psychotherapy. Far from big and overcrowded asylums or physical therapies, as electrotherapy, used in others private clinics, Dr. Albert Prévost (1881–1926) wanted an institution where he could practice this new form of care he had discovered in Paris and which was yet more and more in vogue in the US. This will to keep the sanatorium at the avant-garde of the science of spirit remained, even after Prevost’s death. Indeed, the Sanatorium Prévost, which became the Institut Albert-Prévost in 1955, was during all its existence, a space of experimentation and valorization of the psychiatric sciences’ latest discoveries. This is what we want to demonstrate in this paper by following the path and realisations of the sanatorium main physicians, from the founders of francophone Québec neurology like Albert Prévost, Edgar Langlois (1893–1941), Roma Amyot (1899–1980) and Jean Saucier (1899–1968) to the first Québec psychoanalysts Karl Stern (1906–1975), Victorin Voyer (1917–1975) or Camille Laurin (1922–1999). We will yet see that the Sanatorium Albert-Prévost has always been at the cutting edge of psychiatric science, while keeping its own psychotherapeutic approach, centered on the patients’ care, on which it had been founded.