JLE

Annales de Gérontologie

MENU

From the madness to the dementia Volume 3, issue 4, décembre 2010

Author
18 ; Imm A Angle Siam-Madagascar Diour Jamaa, Rabat, 10000, Maroc

Since the consciousness of the man of his own existence, he collided with the death and with the madness as limits in his vast faculties of ideation and language, but ipso facto as both compulsory fields of any activity of creation; at first in mythological terms and metaphysics, always in artistic figures, and since the second half of the 18 th century, the science realizes the break with the ancient systems, stands out as the archetypal generator of the meaning so touching in its evolution the dogmatism of a scientism almost millenarian. In this context, the medical sciences prove their efficiency in the fight against the disease including the mental illness and pretty much in the understanding of the mechanisms of the ageing and the intellectual deterioration of the old subject. The old subject with dementia is so nowadays outlined as the symbolic figure at the same time of enormous progress in medicine for more than two centuries and of new challenge of producing meaning which arise not only in the medical sciences but also in the other fields of the knowledge, in a likely inflexion point of the concepts and the representations.