Article

Neuropsychiatry had a profound impact on the life and work of one of the most
influential French writers of the 20th century, Frederic Sauser, better known by
his pen name Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961). Cendrars, whose right writing hand was
amputated after a battlefield wound in 1915, described with acuity his stump pain
and phantom limb syndrome.
He became a left-handed writer. Between 1956 and his
death in 1961, he also suffered two strokes that progressively paralyzed his left
side and greatly diminished his ability to speak. Cendrars had started medical
school in his youth and found that his ideas about the genesis of mental
disorders conflicted with the generally accepted psychiatric conceptions of
hysteria or psychoanalysis. His theories were greatly enriched by his
observations of fellow World War I soldiers, victims of neuropsychiatric
disorders. In his novels, many of his characters had borderline conditions,
including two spectacularly mad serial killers, Moravagine and Febronio. The case
of Moravagine, fashioned after a patient with a brain tumor, allowed Cendrars to
examine the nebulous frontier between neurological and psychiatric diseases.
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Langue : ANGLAIS