In this text I am going to focus on a subject of importance, especially since new conceptions, new paradigms, as well as new practices are appearing, particularly in France (the publications and clinical experiments of Camille Veit, for example). This work is based on historical, sociological, political and, of course, psychiatric data drawn from the literature.

I took up the main texts of the era concerning the homeless population, in order to analyze these texts’ scientific, ideological, political, and sociological underpinnings, starting with Jean-Martin Charcot, who in 1888 created a psychiatric entity called an ‘epileptic fugue’ or ‘ambulatory automatism,’ borrowing the term automatism from Hughlins Jackson.

On examination of these studies, four clinical forms were described: Traumatic amnesia; Non-convulsive epilepsy; Sleepwalking; Voyages of the alienated. These four conceptions will be discussed, contextualized, and described according to the stakes laid out by the alienists of the time.

Later, other hypotheses would emerge, such as neurasthenia, psychasthenia, and others. This illustrates how psychiatry is alive with ideas, without neglecting its sub‘jacencies,’ with terminologies and explanations undergoing viral expansions.

This work demonstrates the necessary humility of classifications. It was only after the First World War that psychiatry gave ‘wandering’ a free rein, adopting the non-clinical term ‘Vagrant’ and making it a way of being in the world that does not necessarily imply sedentariness.