De la clinique au « terrain fétide et palpitant de la vie » : une mise en perspective psychiatrique de la physiologie clinique

Claude Bernard, and his master François Magendie, by the constitution of physiological science, has brought the establishment of a unifying representation system in the field of medicine. According to these representations, the diseases and the therapeutics would be considered by medical doctors as following the same laws of physiology. Physiology would be the condition of a real scientific medicine. How this positioning may be applied to psychiatry? To answer this question, this article proposes first of all to summarize the principal concepts structuring clinical physiology since Claude Bernard. These concepts are those of the “milieu intérieur”, its stability and its regulation. The principles of this regulation system introduced by Claude Bernard lead us to consider him as the first modern systemic physiologist. Moreover these principles of regulation offer the possibility to understanding in an original way the processes of adaptation and acclimatization of an organism. This article then to analyze how these physiological concepts can be applied to psychiatry, including a discussion on the distinction of normal and pathological (by underlining that the difficulty in defining the disease is not specific to mental disorders), by providing a physiological perspective of the notion of syndrome for linking together in a practical way, the requirements of scientific medicine to that of rigorous clinical medicine.