The notion of personhood is often touched upon in psychiatry, in theory as much as in practice. In our meetings together, Yves Pélicier favored a kind of inquiry in which a search for the meaning of a word is used as a starting point. This compelled us to think about the definition and significance of the terms that we use in our everyday practice. At this reunion in his memory I will try to explore, from the perspective of a psychiatrist, this area of inquiry.