[The stakes in psychiatric hospitalization. Is an ethical approach possible?]

To pose the question of what is at stake in a psychiatric hospitalisation really means to pose the question of its purpose, its justification and ultimately of its underlying ethics. After having defined ethics in its moral and deontological aspects, we shall broach the psychiatric and medical aspect of its politics and relationship to the social field, questions which have become acute because of the fact that they are directly related to our notion of liberty. Certain points shall be more specifically developed: Whom do we serve? To hospitalise, is a medical act. Hospitalisation is a means of protection against Murder and Incest. Hospitalisation is a Third dimension in a Space and Time experience. Our intervention is a logical outcome of our own conception of symptoms and the healing process. What if ultimately, pathology were but the answer to an unverbalized interrogation? To take into consideration, beyond the determinating factors be they genetical, biological, or social, a psychic reality which we recognize in the patient's transfer and his verbalisation, impell a necessary and imperative change in the perspective of the field of conventional psychiatry. To allow oneself to be interrogated by this "Other" discourse, and to assume all the consequences, both theoretical and practical, this is the passing from medical ethics to what might be called analytical ethics.