syndromes” identified by the work of the editors offer intriguing insights—the descriptions of mnestic hypochondria and functional cognitive disorganization bring previously unhelped patients to mind—while reframing some of the interdisciplinary knowledge lying between the covers and encouraging the acknowledgement of narrative’s role in the theoretical and clinical understanding of memory disorders and memory complaints.

Review By

J Arboleda-Flórez MD, FRCPC, FAPA, DABFP, PhD
Kingston, Ontario

To review these 2 volumes, organized as a tribute to the memory of Bruno M Cormier, is to travel back to a time of momentous national issues and, more narrowly, to rediscover the conceptual origins and the figures who shaped the development of forensic psychiatry in Canada. The first volume comprises papers written by Dr Cormier’s close associates and students during the heyday of the McGill University Forensic Clinic at Pine Avenue in Montreal and the therapeutic community at Clinton Prison in Dannemora, New York. In this volume, his colleagues and students fondly display the depth of knowledge of his own

personality that he would have expected them apply to their clinical insights into their patients: they learned well from their master. In these essays, Bruno M Cormier, the father of forensic psychiatry in Canada, appears not only as he was—a pioneer in this clinical field in our country—but also as a rebel and iconoclast, an art connoisseur, and, in its second acceptation, a dilettante of all things cultural.The second volume is a collection of his most important papers: in these, he articulates his conceptualization of forensic psychiatry and the foundations of his teachings on clinical criminology.

Bruno M Cormier established that the utility of forensic psychiatry resided not in the sterile evaluation of an accused for purposes of determining some legal disposition but in a deep understanding of the criminal as a person—a human being sent astray from accepted social paths by circumstances familial or social. Hence, he asserted, the primary function of forensic psychiatry should be treatment and rehabilitation of the offender—the court assessment was only a sidestep. Possibly, his deep commitment to understanding the criminal through the insights of forensic psychiatry and his downplaying of the legalities of the specialty were formed during his growing-up years in a rough Montreal neighbourhood. As a youngster, his impressionable mind must have registered the relation between crime and the squalid life of neighbours who were constantly hauled away by the police of the obscurantist Duplessis years in Quebec. The locus of forensic psychiatry, he determined, would be the penitentiary “bedside,” so to speak, not the courtroom. His work at the St Vincent de Paul Penitentiary and (through his program along the lines of a therapeutic community) at Clinton prison in Dannemora, New York, exemplify his dedication to practising his insights on the human nature of the criminal.

The rebellious and iconoclastic streak in his character appeared early in his youth, when in 1948 he became a signatory to Le Refus Global, an anticlerical manifesto that helped to shake off the connubial relation of church and state in Quebec.

This manifesto had major impacts on the Quebec intelligentsia of the postwar years and, eventually, on the launching of Jean Lesage’s révolution tranquille in 1960. As Justin Ciale quite assertively points out in his chapter, Le Refus Gobal was “the harbinger that unfettered Quebec intellectuals from the shackles of clerical control.” The same rebellious streak could be seen again in Cormier’s opposition to the Solicitor General of Canada’s decision to build a series of super-maximum penitentiaries across the country—particularly, Archambault prison in Quebec. He saw them as antithetical to treatment and rehabilitation, as places specifically built to break the human spirit. Unfortunately, his soif de liberté (to use the felicitous phrase of Pierre Gagné) and his knowledge that deprivation of liberty leads to depression and regression were not enough to prevent the implementation of the decision and the subsequent consequences that he had predicted: riots, murder, and mayhem in these institutions .

As described by Renée Fugère and other collaborators in Volume 1, Bruno M Cormier was a renaissance man in his intellectual curiosity and in his search for the essence of the aesthetic in art and in people. Their essays and insights into his person should lead the reader to agree with my understanding of the man: his humanism and his search for beauty, even in the worst criminal, are the characteristics that have made him the true pioneer in forensic psychiatry. Possibly, this is Bruno M Cormier’s best contribution to Canadian psychiatry.

I have enjoyed reading these books. The editors and the contributors have fully succeeded in rendering a tribute to the memory of a remarkable Canadian and psychiatrist. As a reader, they have taken me by the hand down memory lane to remember names and places. They have also allowed me to reacquaint myself with concepts and intellectual issues vital to understanding some aspects of our