A conflict between a historical, sociological and relativist view of madness (Esquirol and Mich a), and an analysis of a structural type that looked at mental illness as involution, degeneracy and a progressive slide to the vanishing point of human nature (Morel); a conflict between a spiritualist theory that defined madness as an alteration in the mind's relation to itself (Langerman and Heinroth), and materialist efforts to localise madness in a differentiated organic space (Spurzheim and Broussais); a conflict between the requirement for a medical judgement that measured the degree of irresponsibility of the mad against the degree of determinism of the mechanisms at work within them, and the immediate appreciation of the insane character of their behaviour (the polemic between Elias gnault and Marc); and a conflict between the humanitarian conception of therapeutics witnessed in the methods used by Esquirol and the infamous 'moral treatment' that used confinement as the major means of submission and repression (Guislain and Leuret).