Abstract

In the area of questions, or rather responses, around the subject of madness (research, treatment, etc.), ‘scientific’ rationality falls back on simple causality, together with a concern for generalization. Drawn from the pure sciences, these categories admit no exceptions, even (and particularly) if the borderlines of madness touch upon the borders of rationality. The clinical experience and rigour of working with madness may lead one to conclude that other criteria are needed. The rationalities at work in the treatment of madness (medical, economic, ideological) are in line with habitual categories, but the specific research area opened up by each disturbed person challenges a causality that has no sense or efficacy except in the dimensions of homogeneous time, oriented from the past to the future. The transferential particularities of the analysis of madness and trauma demand that we critique these principles and describe ways of working with another logic, one that aims to recover lost facts rather than modifying the discourse that represents them