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PRESENTATION OF HENRI EY´S LIBRARY
The Association for Henri Ey´s Foundation has among its goals to preserve Henri Ey´s personal medical library, as well as his files. This library includes about 2500 scientific works, the majority of which corresponds to psychiatry, psychoanalysis and related sciences (psychology, neurology, medicine,pharmacology, and also sociology, ethnology, anthropology, philosophy, religion, history,epistemiology), and about 800-1000 (not thoroughly indexed yet) of general knowledge, literature and art, thus being of considerable interest.
The library describes the itinerary of an exceptional personality who animated French and foreign psychiatry during half a century, from 1926, the year of his thesis on psychiatry with proffessor H. Claude, to 1977, the year of his death. His desk still keeps the signs of current reading and unfinished works about: psichiatry and freedom, history of psychiatry, and criminality and psychiatry.
One of the most remarkable features of this library, is that it was a working library, and not the one of a collector who would have liked to own the most representative books of the history of a theory or of his own subject to his eyes. It was not an ideal library either, which would trace, book after book, the course of a work. In this extent, we should remember that Henry Ey nourished most of his work and thinking by consulting books and magazines at the library of Saint-Anne Hospital (Paris). This library was leaded by himself from 1930 to 1970, and nowadays is called "Henry Ey Library". It has a few old books, (previous to XX century), and neither the works of Jackson and Janet nor an original edition of Moureau de Tours appear in the catalogue, unless they were discovered in the future. This is a very paradoxical fact for those who know Ey´s work.
On the other hand, it is a library wich goes along H. Ey´s everyday life. It was enriched with meetings, friendships, congresses, trips, theses, comptes rendues for magazines, specially for L´Evolution Psiquiatrique. Thus appears Ey´s international dimension, with a surprising importance and language diversity of his works ( 40 % of them are writtten in 13 foreign languages, mainly English, German and Spanish, nearly his mother languaje, together with catalan). Likewise there appear work relationship and frindships,which can be read over the first page of various dedicated books: over five hundred of them take a signature, a discreet or outstanding homage, a friendly reference or a sagacious word from a famous personality (Lacan, Binswanger, Minkowski, Laborit, Lain Entralgo,etc) or from an unkown character.
Of his 140 theses, we have picked up those wich mark the trends of Claude´s (25) and Jean Delay´s (26) schools in Ste. Anne, and of those of Burdeos, Lyon and Toulouse. Also those of S. Nacht and D. Lagache, G. Petit, Mr. Dide and Starobinski. It is not surprising to find a great deal of psychoanalitic works (242) , namely Freud´s and Jung´s, whose appearences are contemporary to Ey´s work, as well as books belonging to the phenomenologic trend (62), from Binsgwanger to Minkowsky and Zutt.
Finally, the library keeps the Master´s readings alive, with many outstanding and noted works, like those of Freud, Husserl, P. Ricoeur, M. Foucault or Plotino.
The library is also rich in various comptes rendus of national and international congresses, and includes magazines about psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology, putting at first rank the complete collection of L´Evolution Psiquiatrique, the Enciclopédie Médico Chirurgicale, etc.
It became imperative to figure out an index with both objectives of inventory and evolution, which could be easy to consult and perfectible to the extent of details and findings. This demanded both statistical and qualitative searching engines. For this reason we have chosen an informatic support from the beginning.
Thus, this index completes J. Grignon´s remarkable work: the almost 500 publications by Ey are available at L´Evol. Psiquiatrique 1977, Volume XLII, III/ 2 (a special number, homage to Henry Ey) , pp. 1109 ˆ 1138, reviewed and enlarged in 1944 in his thesis of Doctor on Psychiatry (Prof. Vergote, Lovaina, Belg.).
To sum up, we are very pleased to make this library available to students, investigators, historians and erudites, as well as to the great audience and the well-intended curious, via the Internet server of the French Federation of Psychiatry.
Dr. Patrice Belzeaux ( Perpignan Fr)