Abstract:
In this article, the author, guided by Lacan’s proposition in her 21st seminar, Les non-dupes errent, that horror presides over knowledge, and using the theory of Lacanian discourses as a methodological basis, examines the structuring of psychiatric knowledge from two fundamental moments: its emergence with the Pinelian clinic and break with the practices of alienism, and its modernization in the late nineteenth century with the propositions of Emil Kraepelin’s biologizing psychiatry. We maintain that the path of psychiatry from its constitution to the present moment is based on the horror aroused by madness.
Keywords:
mental disorders; psychiatry; psychoanalysis