Psychiatry and the clinical findings

Le plan de crise is the crisis plan, and English builds that the way it builds every compound of the kind: by standing two nouns next to each other. French cannot. It has to put de between them, and then it has to settle something English never asks about — whether an article follows. Left out, the second noun stops pointing at anything and becomes a label for the type. Un plan de crise is a plan of the crisis kind, written before there is a crisis; une attaque de panique is an attack of the panic kind, not the attack of one particular panic. Put an article in and the words point at something definite instead: le début des troubles takes des because those are this person’s disorders, the ones the file has already named. A third shape hides in plain sight, because le modèle du rétablissement keeps its article for the reason that gives French la liberté and le sommeil: an abstract noun taken in general is definite there. Three shapes in French, one in English, and the choice comes up in almost every term on this page.