Ey, Henri

   (pronounced [EYE])

   (1900–1977)

   Originator of the "organo-dynamic" school of thought in French psychiatry after the Second World War, Ey was born in a village in southwest France, finished his medical studies in Paris, and interned in the psychiatric hospitals of the Seine Department (Paris). In 1925, he became professor Henri Claude’s (1869–1945) chef de clinique (comparable to an assistant professor who also has a junior hospital appointment) at Ste.-Anne mental hospital, then moved to Bonneval asylum (Eure-et-Loir department) in 1931 as chief psychiatrist. He would remain at Bonneval for the next 30 years. Ey promulgated an "organo-dynamic" view of psychiatry in which brain biology (on the model of John Hughlings Jackson’s "hierarchy of distintegration") rubbed shoulders with psychoanalysis. Despite his rustic post, Ey remained an influential figure in Paris because of the Wednesday seminars that he held at Ste.-Anne, which had great influence upon the whole generation of French psychiatrists who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s. (The library where he gave these is now called the Henri Ey Library.)

   Ey was said to have scorned the introduction of the new psychopharmaceuticals in the 1950s and after (even though they revolutionized his practice at Bonneval). His ideas about psychopathology, involving Jacksonian positive and negative symptoms across the whole range of psychosis and neurosis, appeared in his three volumes of Psychiatric Studies (Études psychiatriques) between 1948 and 1954. In 1960, Ey coauthored with Paul Bernard (qualified 1938) at the Ste.-Anne mental hospital and Charles Brisset (qualified 1944) at the Hôpital Rothschild an important Textbook of Psychiatry (Manuel de psychiatrie), and he was editor of the journal L’évolution psychiatrique from 1947 to 1971. Said Swiss psychiatrist Christian Müller (1921–) of Ey’s influence, "If I had to make a choice . . . and say who around the year 1960 most authoritatively influenced European psychiatry, I would certainly name for Germany Kurt Schneider, for England Aubrey Lewis, and for France Henri Ey."