[Marcel Sembat's Psychology: the Hobby of a Politician?

The socialist politician Marcel Sembat’s unpublished manuscripts reveal the unexpected figure of a diarist with a passion for his own intimate, bodily, sexual and affective economy, and of an autodidact and sometimes polemical reader of psychology (for instance Pierre Janet’s). Sembat was recognized nonetheless as a potentially publishable author by Georges Dumas, the editor of the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, who asked him to contribute an article – which was never published – on dreaming. Sembat was also particularly receptive to Freud’s early conceptions of sexuality. Was Marcel Sembat an amateur, like the painter Ingres playing the violin? Could he be characterized as a “psychologist from below”? As a dilettante? Or simply as a cultivated man according to the meaning this period ascribed to the term?