An original retrospective of psychiatric practices since the 1950s, and a reflection on human responsibility in the face of the errors of reason.

Today, psychiatrists involved in legal proceedings are increasingly exposing criminally insane patients to punishments and prison sentences. These experts thus entrust the justice system with the responsibility for a potentially dangerous patient, whose care can be problematic. Examining a series of psychiatric expert reports, Caroline Protais analyzes how the dominant professional discourse has evolved as the humanism of the first alienists of the 19th century was replaced in the 1960s by increasingly punitive tendencies still commonplace today.