From Philippe Pinel's Treatise on Insanity (1801) to the recent fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), psychiatric textbooks have sought to establish classifications of mental illness in order to provide a basis for a standardized diagnosis. The ongoing controversies about the aims and uses of the DSM-5 forcefully demonstrate to what extent knowledge production in psychiatry is bound up with specific forms of publication destined to act as works of reference. With this conference, we propose to focus on the question of how authoritative psychiatric texts were established by investigating their multiple functions and uses in different fields, ranging from literature and journalism to legal and bureaucratic contexts. This entails detailed studies of the processes of publication and reception of such canonical texts, not only in allied or rival disciplines (philosophy, psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis), but also among non-professional readers who have engaged in various ways with these texts. Questioning the psychiatric canon then also implies investigating in closer detail the relations between official texts and forms of literature that came to be classified as marginal or deviant.

If even Pinel's early Treatise was a widely read and influential book with an entangled history, other psychiatric textbooks of the 19th century could be considered veritable bestsellers. This is a case that could be made for Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and also, if to a lesser extent, for textbooks such as Emil Kraepelin's or Eugen Bleuler's Lehrbücher der Psychiatrie which introduced the famous diagnostic categories "dementia praecox" and "schizophrenia". The co-existence of different national traditions and competing schools places psychiatric textbooks at critical moments of disputes over the clinical validity of nosological categories and about methods of teaching and transmitting knowledge. A longue durée approach which pays attention to allied and rival "psy sciences" as well as to philosophical and literary strategies to account for mental illnesses and to the editorial politics of publishers should enable us to arrive at a more precise view of the specific role of writing and reading practices that shape the making of knowledge in this field. This conference, then, aims to address a number of issues that have received little attention, such as the history of canonizing processes, the transformation of publication standards, and the importance of rhetoric for psychiatry.