Schizomaniac in Paris

Worshipers at the cathedral of Notre Dame last Easter were shocked by a young man in the robes of a Dominican monk, who stormed the pulpit and shouted "God is dead!" (TIME, April 17). Paris psychiatrists took him over from the police for examination and the current issue of the English-language literary journal, Transition, carries the psychiatrists' report. Samples of the report's psychiatric word-weaving:

"Michel Mourre suffers from psychical disturbance of the schizomaniacal (Claude) type. Pride, desire to show off his personality and to represent himself entirely in his actions . . . Auto-didactism. Blitz philosophico-culture, with motorised arguments, but no main striking force. Highly assured personal modern outlook. Indignant irritation at the suggestion that Being may have preceded existence . . . Vaingloriously established in existentialism.

"Present ocular reflexes indifferent. Very strong tendinous reactions. Trembling in tongue and fingers. Hyper-emotivity. Intelligent. Able to go straight to the core of a doctrine. A didactic tone hostile to originality. Temperament of a professor. Artistic but republican mind. Possibility of a cure following a fit of modesty. His condition requires that ... he be confined in a lunatic asylum, where he can receive the treatment of which he is in need."

The report was more shocking to Parisian intellectuals than the original incident had been to the worshipers. To many, it sounded like a fair description of any eager young existentialist. So shrill, in fact, was the outcry that tendinous, hyperemotive Michel Mourre was released on bail, has written (for a couple of French newspapers) the memoirs of his autodidactic life as a Dominican student, as an existentialist, and as a bohemian.

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