Jules Séglas

Who was Jules Séglas?

Jules Séglas was a French psychiatrist who practiced medicine at the Bicêtre and Salpêtrière Hospitals in Paris.

Early in his career he was an assistant to famed neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Séglas' ideas and theories influenced a number of psychiatrists, including Henri Ey and Jacques Lacan. In 1908 he became president of the Societe Medico-Psychologique.

In the field of psychopathology he conducted studies of delusions, hallucinations and pseudohallucinations, providing a detailed nosology of these phenomena. He did extensive research of language and its relationship to mental illness. Here he described linguistic traits such as logorrhea, embolalia, near-mutism, automatic speech, alexia, agraphia, et al.; and how these behaviors take shape and interact in various psychiatric disorders.