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This brief but logical and thought-provoking book is written by the chief physician of the famous Maison National de Charenton. The author is an experienced psychiatrist who grew up with the problem of mental illness, since his father was also a psychiatrist. The book is divided into two parts, of which the first deals with disorganization of the personality due to natural causes and the second with disorganization provoked by the physician for therapeutic purposes.
The author insists, first, on the importance of the sentiment of personality for the well-being of the individual and of society and studies the causes of a sentiment of depersonalization. There are many hypotheses, mostly purely verbal descriptions or assumptions based on vague physiological data concerning vascular, hormonal, or endocrine perturbations. The last seem to be at the bottom of our sentiment of the existence and life of our body. But the sentiment of the