Contenu du sommaire : Les sciences du psychisme et l'animal

The purpose of this article is to shed light on the notion of “animality” and its ambivalent meaning (is animality what is shared by both humans and animals, or is it what negatively separates the latter from the former?) by tracing its historical background and development in the 19th century. During the 19th century, the notion was indeed largely discussed in France in the scientific world and by authors such as Balzac and Michelet. Its contemporaneity was reinforced by a social context, the relationship between men and animals enduring deep transformations at the time. The pet phenomenon and the agricultural expansion led to a strengthened intimacy and material familiarity with animals in city flats as well as farms. Furthermore, the birth of animal protection (creation of the Society for the Protection of Animals, adoption of the Grammont law prohibiting ill-treatments) amplified the idea that there should be some sort of natural and beneficiary proximity between men and animals. However the 19th century was also paradoxically the time of the development of public hygiene policies that chastised the promiscuity between humans and animals. The animal world was then put under a strict surveillance and linked to possible disciplinary measures, ranging from banishment to elimination. Thus the shaping of those spaces of death and internment such as slaughterhouses and dog pounds, where this animality that was judged unworthy of living with humans began to be put aside.

Why do some dogs resemble their masters? And what should we think of people who spend more time with their animals than with their relatives? As pets invaded cities in the 19th century, these questions were seriously examined. No one was sure whether animals and humans were meant to share such a level of intimacy. Worried that this might be dangerous, psychiatrists questioned the psychological effects of these contacts. This article deals with the evolution of this debate in nineteenth-century French psychiatric discourses, tracing the changes in the meaning of the word “zoophilia”, from a laudatory connotation to a pathological one. I begin by analysing the little-known participation of alienists to the creation of the French Society for Animal Protection in 1846. I then show how French mad-doctors, who were thus initially favourable to interspecies contacts, finally changed their opinion and came to believe that humans and animals were damaging each other's soundness of mind.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the name of Pierre Hachet-Souplet was commonly cited in France by those who debated the creation of a new discipline: the “animal psychology”. Hachet-Souplet was already known by naturalists and by the lay audience for his work on techniques of dressage, and now his studies were also quoted by distinguished psychologists such as Édouard Claparède. However, although Hachet-Souplet was once even promised the creation of a dedicated laboratory (an Institute for the study of zoological psychology), he was finally cast off by the scientific community. Through the complex story of this enlightened amateur, this article thus sheds light on the difficulties of creating a viable and cogent model for an animal psychology in a context of shifting disciplinary boundaries.

After being analyzed by Sigmund Freud, Marie Bonaparte became his pupil and played a vital role in the development of psychoanalysis in France. She was also a friend of Gustave Le Bon with whom she shared a strong interest in science. She was particularly close with the scientists from the Pasteur Institute of Paris. In addition to her psychoanalytic work, she published a book, translated into German by Freud, on the story of her dog Topsy. The analysis of this book reveals not only the nature of her relationship with animals but also with science.

In 1972, the French psychologist René Zazzo declared that a “new fact” similar to the darwinian “scientific revolution” had just been discovered in the field of psychology. He referred to the attachment theory or rather to the discovery of this theory by John Bowlby (1907-1990), who had found out, reading ethologist studies, that attachment was not the result of learning but rather caused by a “primal need”. Using these animal findings to comprehend human behaviours, Bowlby estimated that this indeed shattered the utter existence of psychoanalysis: for if attachment was primal, then it could not result from the satisfaction of hunger as psychoanalysts had previously believed with the notion of libido. This article thus has two methodological goals. First, it aims to propose a new way of writing transnational history. I deliberately proceed in a regressive way, starting from an analysis of Zazzo's operation of importation before going back to the context of departure. Secundly, it aims to contribute to a reflexion on the relationships between the history of science and what I call “indigenous history”. Starting from the historical discourse of the actors (here: Zazzo and Bowlby), I want to think about the statut of the one proposed by the historian of science.

Since the 1960s, a still increasing number of publications have reported the psychic and\or physiological health benefits of the contact with certain animals (mostly dogs, cats, horses and dolphins). Carried mainly by the disciplines of the psyche (psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy), these practices and\or experiments of care using interactions with animals are even today the object of numerous internal controversies. Are the effects real? By what means are they produced? Are they generalizable? On what conditions? The purpose of this paper is to go back to the origin of research regarding Interactions with Animals with Therapeutic purpose (I.A.T.), in order to understand what is at stakes with these controversies. Thus, we will present literature published between 1960 and 1985 in the United States. We will then connect the analysis of its contents to the constitution of a network of heterogeneous actors, all interested in the production of "strong" knowledges about the positive effects of interactions with animals on human health.

This article follows three aims: it documents minor traditions through the case of Swiss ethnography; it underlines their value for the general historiography of ethnography and its chronology; it identifies how various conceptions of a same discipline interact and tackles the relations between continuity and discontinuity in the history of humanities. To do so, I first describe the organisation of ethnographic research in Switzerland between 1880 and 1940. Focusing of the case of Basel, I then identify its specific research practices and wonder if its origin is to be found in historiographical biaises or in historical differences. Eventually, I show how the study of minor traditions helps to grasp the relations between sciences of the center and of the periphery.

This paper seeks to examine the history of the social sciences, and especially of anthropology, in the city of Toulouse during the period of the Vichy government. Indeed, this case study is interesting analyzing the complexity of scientific and political commitments during this time. By drawing attention to the notion of ambivalence, the analysis suggests more than a simplistic antagonistic dichotomy between résistants and pétainistes, and allows to posit a more nuanced approach of the ‘reconstruction' of social sciences and anthropology in post-war France.

Maximilien Sorre (1880-1962) promoted human ecology in geography. From his thesis, entitled Les Pyrénées méditerranéennes. Étude de géographie biologique (1913), to his 1943 essay Les fondements biologiques de la géographie humaine, his work focuses on the relationships between human beings and the living environment. During the interwar period, he developed a medical geography within an ecologic approach, conceptualizing “pathogenic complexes” as a description for living interactions resulting in a given disease. The objective of this article is to render the conditions of possibility of these works, in terms of both disciplinary concerns and Sorre's trajectory. This article studies the ways and means of this human ecology: how does it consider the place of humans in the environment? How does it comprehend the disease? It also discusses the interactions with biological and medical sciences, and the acculturation processes resulting from their contact.