The Man Who Didn't Exist: The Case of Louis Althusser

On the morning of November 16, 1980, the eminent Parisian philosopher and Communist intellectual, Louis Althusser, burst from his shuttered apartment at the École Normale Supérieure in a state of confusion and disarray, calling to his friend and physician Pierre Étienne that he had strangled his wife Hélène. The body of the victim lay across their bed peacefully, without any indication of struggle, perplexing those arriving on the scene and instilling a mystery reinforced by Althusser's own amnesia, as he brooded in isolation at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the site of his first admission for manic-depressive psychosis in 1947. To the dismay of many, the court ruled that because of his mental illness he was not to be legally charged, leaving events behind the murder unexamined and open to speculation. Partly for this reason, Althusser wrote a remarkable autobiography, L'Avenir dure longtemps (1985), with the intent of throwing light on this sad final chapter of his history.1

Aside from its relevance to forensic psychiatry, this document, with its strange mixture of fact, fantasy, and delusion, raises fascinating questions about human behavior, the nature of the self, and mental illness. Because of the public nature of his apparent act of madness, which Althusser placed in the context of his private psychic reality, as well as in the context of his philosophy of history and subjectivity, the autobiography bears comparison to that of Presiding Judge Schreber, mined by Freud (1911) for his theory of paranoia. It demonstrates what is at once most familiar to clinicians (the repetitive phenomenology of a major mental disorder) and most unfathomable (the unique case)—all the more so since Althusser had undergone years of biological treatments and psychoanalytic therapy, and written with real insight on these subjects.