L’expertise psychiatrique des incestueux au XIXe siècle : un exercice insignifiant ?

Abstract

In the first half of the Nineteenth-Century, the work of Pinel and Esquirol contributed to create the erotomania category which allowed the French society to newly consider the sexual offenders as deviants. Refining these theories at the end of the century, the psychiatrist science reassessed these deviances in order to complete and analyse them thanks to the new category of perversion. In parallel, all during the century, the male figure of incest has been the subject of multiplied essays in the social, judicial and litterary fields which entended to alarm the society about the dangerosity of these offenders. However, the male incest has never been theorised as a sexual peversion unlike the female incest in which the women has been showed as deviants and perverts. How can we explain and understand these differences? Why the psychiatrist science did not analyse the male offenders as perverts while the women, less visible in the French society, have been categorized as such?

Keywords

• alienism
• criminality
• gender
• incest
• justice