The CRPMS (Research Center for Psychoanalysis, Medicine and Society) is characterized by its transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach. Its themes and research objects are situated at the point where psychoanalysis, medicine (somatic and psychiatric) and social and societal phenomena overlap.
As medicine became scientific, its methods, principles and means of action were profoundly changed. Until this turning point, medical practice was a religious, magical or sacred type of action. The position of the doctor made him a man of authority supported by more or less enigmatic doctrines, in the name of which he operated not without skill and success. This aspect is certainly not absent from today's practice, but it is ignored, misunderstood or considered as an accessory element, possibly useful for the observance of treatments. We can even make the hypothesis that the emergence of psychoanalysis, at the end of the 19th century, corresponds to this abandonment by medicine of what made the psychotherapeutic resource of this relationship, a place that corresponds to a generic function in culture and the social link. A whole field of works and actions then appeared at this articulation between medicine and psychoanalysis (M. Balint, G. Raimbault). Indeed, doctors and their patients are not reduced to pure subjects of science. These relationships affect them, and are not without various consequences on their practices. The fact that scientific medicine needs - for the greater benefit of patients - this reduction between the subject of science and the body as a "machine", does not take away the importance and the impact of the subject and the lived body. This is what the complexity of the requests addressed to medicine testifies to, as well as the increasingly insistent recourse to psychologists or psychiatrists in the medical services.
There is therefore a complementarity between medicine and psychoanalysis, as evidenced both by their common history and by the development of contemporary practices.
In order to take into account this field of research, Danièle Brun founded in 2001, with Pierre Fédida and Alain Vanier, the Centre de Recherches Psychanalyse et Médecine, introducing this theme to the University for the first time. The research undertaken in recent years shows the fertility of the field and the interest in shedding light on the theoretical and clinical issues that are emerging. Very quickly, new issues related to the work undertaken have emerged. Thus, psychiatry is now turning the corner, as shown by the insistent return of the clinical question among young practitioners. The ethical questions that arose in medicine from technical advances, although always present in psychiatry, have been revived by the changes in the clinical approach and the epistemological debates that are emerging. Moreover, the magico-religious aspect of medicine is reappearing widely in the surrounding discourse where science and scientific medicine, which have become real phenomena of civilization, unwittingly produce statements that generate beliefs, commanding behaviors which, although based on hygienic imperatives, are no less conjuring acts based on an economy of superstition. The return of the religious, noticeable today, is not without relation to the situation of a world where the progress of the discourse of science undoes the dimension of the sense, without being able, as such, to propose another one. The law, ethical and philosophical reflection, anthropological and sociological approaches lead us to engage in multidisciplinary studies in the fields concerned.
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