[The inhibition of action. Interdisciplinary approach of its mechanisms and physiopathology]

The author recalls his group's work during the three past decades and how, starting from the study of traumatic states, he established the distinction between shock and stress, physiologically and biologically speaking. According to him, stress supposes a memory process, i.e. the learning of the inefficiency of action in controlling the environmental characteristics. This learning involves cerebral areas and nerve tracks which, as behavioural consequences produce action inhibition. In the neurophysiological field, he underlines the importance, for these mechanisms, of the cortex, dorsal Ammon's horn, lateral tonsil and subthalamic nucleus. He shows why it seems obvious that the mediators of the action inhibiting system are acetylcholine and serotonin. He also recalls the many experimental facts which allow to say that the action inhibiting system is responsible for the release of the hypothalamic-hypophyseal-adrenocortical reaction and of the peripheric sympathetic adrenergic reaction to aggression. He finally shows the function of these two systems where the main pathological accidents originate. He also stresses the discovery and the introduction in the therapeutical paraphernalia of a new molecule minaprine, which he considers as inhibiting action inhibition, and as such, as an indirect anti-depressive drug. The pathology, which is said psychosomatic, thus becomes a pathology of action inhibition, where unconscious memory of past interdictions and failures, relates the subject and his present reaction to environment, to his whole psycho-social past.