ABSTRACT
When I joined Alain Touraine’s sociology laboratory at the end of 1968, it was located at number 10, rue Monsieur le Prince, in Auguste Comte’s house. The following year it moved into the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, where different centres of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales were relocated, on the former site of the Cherche-Midi prison, across from the Lutetia Hotel. Had I read Paul Arbousse-Bastide’s book Auguste Comte et la folie 1 (Auguste Comte and Madness) I could have invoked the authority of the inventor of the word “sociology”, to justify our subsequent decision to work in different public psychiatric hospitals, and my choice of Don Quixote as our ally in conducting our weekly seminar entitled “Madness and the Social Link”.
