Between Psychiatry and Philosophy: Madness in Balzac's Adieu

Balzac's Adieu tells the story of a war trauma and a radical therapeutic experiment; it enables the analysis of how the text hesitates between clinical discourse (with room for medical knowledge and in particular for the founders of modern psychiatry, Pinel and Esquirol), scientific intuition (in some respects already close to Freud), and the ambivalent symbolism which justifies the inclusion of the short story in the Philosophical studies whose enigmatic characteristics it shares.