5 December 2025

10:55 AM – 11:40 AM

Amphi Petit Kursaal

Sylvain Dal

Sylvain Dal is a psychiatrist, head of department and training supervisor at the Clinique Saint-Jean in Brussels; he is also in charge of the day hospital at the Hôpital Saint-Jean de Dieu in Leuze-en-Hainaut, Belgium. In addition to the flat country, his training has taken him briefly to Montreal, the Netherlands and, more recently, Lille. His interests include phenomenology, paranoia, the development of psychogeriatrics and institutional analysis. He advocates a general psychiatry, with the psychotherapeutic dimension at its core. Sylvain Dal is vice-president of the Centre et Ecole Belge de Daseinsanalyse and editor-in-chief of the International Federation of Daseinsanalysis. He teaches psychiatric assistants at the Université Catholique de Louvain as part of an introduction to phenomenology and existential dimensions in therapy. He is also deeply involved in other fields: music, in particular free improvisation, audio-visual research and microcontroller programming.

Where does the madness begin?

The question of the boundary between the normal and the pathological, in terms of behavior, or to put it another way: in psychiatry, is a long-standing one, which remains a burning issue. It arises in a variety of situations: firstly, to define whether a situation falls within the scope of psychiatry: how far does the field of this discipline extend? Does any strange, disturbing or delinquent behavior fall within its remit? Does the media coverage over the past 20 years of “new disorders” (ADHD, HPI, ASD, etc.) suggest a welcome destigmatization of psychological suffering, or its reification in an expanding psychiatric nosology, with the risk of secondary benefits? Finally, the relationship with a common, shared reality is currently being called into question by movements that are very different from one another, but share a common distancing from reality: the trivialization of “alternative facts”, the licensing and massive dissemination of conspiracy theories, the self-definition of gender detached from the biological substratum. How do these phenomena differ from the cardinal psychiatric symptom of delirium? These few questions will help us to identify both the necessity and the difficulty of defining this boundary.