Maurice Leenhardt et l'invention d'une personnalité indigène en Nouvelle-Calédonie
- 作者：Y. Mouchenik
- 关键词：Ethnology ; New Caledonia ; Phenomenology ; Psychiatry ; Psychology
- 刊名：Annales medico-psychologiques
- 出版年：2006
- 期刊代码：78_00034487
- 类别：psy
- 出版时间：October 2006
- 卷：164
- 期：8
- 页码：659-667
- 文件大小：318 K
摘要
Maurice Leenhardt is one of the very few ethnologists who influenced the psychological and psychiatric theories of his time. In order to better understand Leenhardt's work, it is indispensable to examine his work according to at least five references: Lucien Levy-Bruhl's ethnological theories, colonial psychiatry, differential psychology, historical psychology and phenomenological psychiatry. The theoretical propositions of Levy-Bruhl and Leenhardt greatly interested psychiatrists and psychologists of their time especially in the debate on the universality of the human psyche and on the nature of mental illness and mental health, as well as on analogies between the child, the primitive and the neurotic already present in psychiatric, psychological developmental theory and psychoanalysis. The theory of Maurice Leenhardt describing a Kanak's “normal-pathological” personality meet with the psychoanalytic analogy and developmental psychology of his time uniting the neurotic, the child and the primitive as well as the more drastic definitions of French and English colonial psychiatry. The ethnopsychological elaborations of Maurice Leenhardt appear not only in his well-known book Do Kamo, but also before and after this work in many articles on mental, cognitive and affective functioning of the Kanak. Until now there has been a constant and recurrent use of his theory in the writings of psychiatrists actually working in New Caledonia. We can describe Maurice Leenhardt's theory as an “ethnopsychology” due to his previous connection to the “psychologie des peuples”. We can retain some of the following aspects of the Kanak ethnopsychology as theorised by Leenhardt: lack of differentiation with nature, the notion of participation already developed by Levy-Bruhl, fusion with the environment, identity with nature, a collective being who is not yet an individual subject, a mythic mentality, lack of distinction between the world and the person. Some of these conceptions of “primitive mind” were already criticised by Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss. In Leenhardt's description of radical otherness, the indigenous person remains totally estranged to those unable to perceive his internal world. Leenhardt develops his theory from austronesian linguistics, which he continues to elaborate in Do Kamo following his conceptions of the Kanak personality with its mythical and sociomythical elements as his phenomenological foundation of their manner of being in the world as well as the corollaries of prelogistic non-rational and non-individuated thinking. The ethnology of Maurice Leenhardt was linked with the current intellectual movement of his time as well as their impasses. Leenhardt ignored historical psychology, phenomenological psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. However his concepts had a direct influence on psychiatric theories in New Caledonia which up to now allow most local psychiatrists to bypass trans-cultural and anthropological research on the Kanak population they are working with. It is equally important to include Maurice Leenhardt's works in the missionary movement of his time as well as in the French and British colonial psychiatry movement.