Dissertation project
Léo Tertrais-Flamand, « Neurosciences du psychopathe. De la personnalité psychopathique au cerveau psychopathe, sociologie des usages scientifiques d’une catégorie psychiatrique et de sa circulation entre l’Amérique du Nord et la France », thèse de sociologie en préparation à l’université Paris Nanterre, sous la direction de Sébastien Lemerle (direction principale) et d’Isabelle Coutant (IRIS, codirection).
According to the American Psychiatric Association, the term "psychopath" is an obsolete way of referring to "antisocial personality disorder," a pathological tendency to transgress social norms and disregard the rights of others. However, during the second half of the 20th century, more and more academic actors use the category of psychopath, and one can observe an exponential increase of publications on the subject. Within this production, the most striking phenomenon is the neuroscientific uses of the category. This thesis explores the institutional, historical, experimental, and etiological stakes of this quest for the "psychopathic brain", from a sociology of science and technology perspective. The aim is to measure the circulation of a category within the different scientific fields that use it. We will pay attention to the controversies that agitate the members of this scientific community, the diffusion of their work by cultural intermediaries, as well as their interventions in the public space and the intellectual field. Moreover, we will consider extra-academic practices by borrowing tools from the sociology of law and the sociology of mental health, to grasp these modes of re-problematization, management, and even medicalization of deviance, violence, and crime.
Publications
