Reconstructing a Scholarly Network from the Bonneval Hospital Collections: Relationships and Misconceptions Derived from Historical Archives
The French psychiatric hospital Henri Ey in Bonneval (Eure-et-Loir, Central France) is known in the history of psychiatry for a series of conferences, which brought together several key figures in the mental health field in the 1940s. The conference sessions have been published in two major volumes: Le Problème de la psychogenèse des névroses et des psychoses (The Problem of the Psychogenesis of Neuroses and Psychoses, 1950), and L’Inconscient (The Unconscious, 1966). The proceedings consist of theoretical essays and minutes of the intellectual discussions between French psychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts and philosophers. We will analyze this network through an investigation into the archives of the journal L’Évolution psychiatrique (The Evolution of Psychiatry) in order to reconstruct the history of the intellectual life of French psychiatrists in postwar society, in the course of successive reforms in medical education (Debré and Faure Reforms, 1958-1968).