« La souris ne peut pas jouer avec le chat ». Marc Christin, un écrivain à l’asile (Cery, vers 1900)

Abstract

In 1905, Les Évincés, the first book about the Cery asylum, was published in Lausanne under a pseudonym. The account is intended to be a faithful testimony of the experiences of this madhouse in French-speaking Switzerland. With the help of judicial and medical files, this article analyses the conditions of production of a singular publication in the history of asylums, even though it has now been completely forgotten. The first part of the article traces the biography of its author: an asylum patient, Marc Christin is a writer who has suffered numerous criminal convictions, before being established as a case study in "constitutional psychopathy". The second part of the article contextualizes the writing of the book, by studying the economy of the therapeutic and affective relationship that Christin had with Dr Albert Mahaim, director of Cery, as well as the asymmetry of their power relations. At a time when Vaud psychiatry is striving for penal and social reform, the publication of Les Évincés exemplifies the dialectic between forced confinement and the work of the writer who is supposed to demonstrate his autonomy in spite of his confinement.

Keywords

• asylum
• literature
• Cery
• French-speaking Switzerland
• psychopathy
• forensic psychiatry