Albert Demaret, a psychiatrist from Liège, was one of the pioneers of ethological and evolutionary psychopathology. According to this school of thought, mental illness originates in part from resurgent behaviours that once had an adaptive value for hominids or certain animal species. Demaret's book Ethology and Psychiatry has just been re-edited by Mardaga under the direction of Jérôme Englebert, a lecturer at ULg, and Valérie Follet, a clinical psychologist, both of whom also contributed an additional concluding article entitled "Essai de Psychopathologie Éthologique" (Essay on Ethological Psychopathology).

As says Paul Sivadon, former president of the World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH), "over the course of thousands of years, evolution has accumulated the traces of successful adaptive attempts (such as atrophied vestigial structures or modified organs) which have allowed species to survive and develop." For example, the relationship between a fish’s fin and a bird’s wing or other mammal limbs has been well-established. Ethological and evolutionary psychopathology postulates that some of our behaviours originate in our phylogenetic heritage, and there is thus a link between human behaviour and that of animals and ancestral humans.

Albert Demaret, a psychiatrist from Liège who died in 2011, was one of the pioneers of this current of thought, particularly with the publication of his book Ethology and Psychiatry in 1979. The fact that his book is being re-published(1) in February 2014 shows that his ideas remain relevant today. The man who liked to say, "if we aren't stupid, neither are animals," was also an ethologist and naturalist. Jérôme Englebert, a doctor of psychology and lecturer at the University of Liège (ULg), believes that Demaret's book was a revolutionary work that offered a radically new way of looking at psychiatric conditions. But Demaret was often misunderstood, and his work was regarded as an interesting aside that mainstream psychiatry was quick to dismiss in order to follow its straight and narrow path. "He suffered more from lack of recognition than from being challenged", says Jérôme Englebert.

Nevertheless, in an article published in 2007 in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, the biggest names in evolutionary psychiatry hailed his contribution as the originator of the notion of territory in psychopathology, a concept he developed during his studies on manic-depressive psychosis - now called bi-polar disorder (see below).

In any event, the fact that Albert Demaret only published in French certainly limited the impact of his work at a time when English was the omnipotent language in "international science". His approach itself, focused on observation of behaviour rather than book knowledge that is completely removed from "all that is really human about our existence," as said the famous psychiatrist Eugène Minkowski, probably limited access to his work as well. "According to Demaret's way of looking at things, what happens takes precedence over what we know," emphasises Jérôme Englebert.

(1) Albert Demaret, Éthologie et psychiatrie, suivi d'Essai de psychopathologie éthologique par Jérôme Englebert et Valérie Follet, Mardaga, 2014.