[Émile Nelligan (1879-1941) Our Contemporary: Between Freedom and Constraint].

Abstract

Introduction This essay reviews the case of Émile Nelligan, Quebec's most celebrated poet and the Institute's most famous patient. Writing a clinical case study should be relevant for readers of a scientific medical journal. This allows the transfer of important clinical knowledge for optimal medical care of patients. Yet, how do we approach a poet? What method can we adopt to avoid betraying him-neither as a poet nor as a patient? Method The approach is open. We must start by reading the poet and consult the different archives and authors who have already studied him. We trace the journey from Nelligan as a poetic prodigy to being interned in a Montreal asylum, all before he turned 20. Case Presentation An overview of the salient facts of Nelligan's family life, education, poetry, and the onset of his dementia praecox. Arguments are reviewed for Nelligan as a case study of the tension between psychiatry/antipsychiatry, freedom/constraint, madness/creativity, developmental/social determinants of health, as well as the "two solitudes" of Quebec society. Implications A reading of Nelligan torn between the dualities of the two solitudes, liberty and constraint; light and darkness; and what it means to read him as our contemporary for psychiatry, for literature and for Quebec identity.