Synopses & Reviews
In Psychiatric Power, the fourth volume in the collection of his groundbreaking lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault addresses and expands upon the ideas in his seminal Madness and Civilization, sketching the genealogy of psychiatry and of its characteristic form of power/knowledge. Madness and Civilization undertook the archeology of the division according to which, in Western Society, the madman found himself separated from the sane. That book ends with the medicalization of madness at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Psychiatric Power continues this discourse up to the end of the nineteenth century, and the double "depsychiatrization" of madness, now dispersed between the neurologist and the psychoanalyst. Presented in a conversational tone, Psychiatric Power brings fresh access and light to the work of one of the past century's preeminent thinkers. Michel Foucault, acknowledged as the preeminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines. His works include Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, The History of Sexuality, and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Series editor Arnold I. Davidson teaches philosophy, divinity, and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and is executive editor of the journal Critical Inquiry. The author of numerous studies on Foucault, he has been a visiting professor at the Collège de France.
Translator Graham Burchell lives in Italy. He has written essays on Michel Foucault and was an editor of The Foucault Effect: Essays on Governmentality.
In Psychiatric Power Michel Foucault addresses and expands upon the ideas in his seminal Madness and Civilization, sketching the genealogy of psychiatry and of its characteristic form of power/knowledge. Madness and Civilization undertook the archeology of the division according to which, in Western Society, the madman found himself separated from the sane. That book ends with the medicalization of madness at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Psychiatric Power continues this discourse. Foucault sketches the genealogy of psychiatryof its characteristic form of power and knowledgeup to the end of the nineteenth century, and the double "depsychiatrization" of madness, now dispersed between the neurologist and the psychoanalyst. Presented in a conversational tone, Psychiatric Power brings fresh access and light to the work of one of the past century's preeminent thinkers. "[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual codes and ask new questions . . . [He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture."The New York Review of Books
"[Foucault] must be reckoned with by humanists, social scientists, and political activists."The New York Times Book Review
"[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual codes and ask new questions . . . [He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture."The New York Review of Books
"Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are . . . [He carries] out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture."The Nation
Review
"[Foucault] must be reckoned with by humanists, social scientists, and political activists."--The New York Times Book Review
"[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual codes and ask new questions.... [He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture."--The New York Review of Books
"Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are. . . . [He carries] out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture."--The Nation
Review
“A stunning set of lectures given by Foucault that focus on the history of 'avowing' ones acts and the truth of who one is. Foucault seeks to understand at what point it became important not only to confess to a crime, but to avow ones act in public. For Foucault, avowal of ones criminality before an established authority becomes a way of reestablishing that authority, and resisting avowal becomes tantamount to civil disobedience. The political implications of his analysis become especially clear in the interviews included here. This is wonderful and arresting read.”
Review
“The publication of Foucaults Louvain lectures, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, beautifully and rigorously established and commented upon by Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, is an important event in the contemporary blossoming of Foucault studies. In no way is it redundant with the lectures at the Collège de France, whose series is now practically complete. With this amazingly rich inquiry, focusing on the mythical, religious, and judiciary dimensions of 'avowal,' we are offered a unique possibility to understand how Foucaults genealogy articulated the order of discourse and the power of institutions.”
Review
“Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling is one of Foucaults most stirring inquiries into what he has named ‘the hermeneutics of oneself. These lectures stage the concept of avowal in performances as varied as Greek tragedy, criminal justice, and confessional practices; and they provide us with some of Foucaults most illuminating observations on the intimate and agonistic relations between sites of enunciation, orders of truth, and investments of power. The subject of avowal is never free of the ethical exigency and the discursive contingency of 'chang[ing] itself, transform[ing] itself, displac[ing] itself, and becom[ing] to some extent other than itself, and Foucaults genius lies in providing us with critical and genealogical reflections on the worldly practices of avowal. Bernard Harcourt and Fabienne Brions essential afterword provides both a frame and a ballast to the book. This is a considerable addition to the English archive of the work of Michel Foucault.”
Review
”Reconstructed through the patient labours of Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt, . . . [the lectures] are now available in a scrupulous English translation.”
Review
"Fabienne Brion and Bernard Harcourt are to be congratulated for their invaluable work."
Review
“The Louvain lectures show us an aspect of Foucault’s work that is often neglected in an attempt to focus on his commitment to historicizing: that for histories, even genealogical histories, to be constructed, one must not only trace the changes themselves but also that which is changed and therefore remains, in its changes, continuous.”
Synopsis
In Psychiatric Power, the fourth volume in the collection of his groundbreaking lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault addresses and expands upon the ideas in his seminal Madness and Civilization, sketching the genealogy of psychiatry and of its characteristic form of power/knowledge. Madness and Civilization undertook the archeology of the division according to which, in Western Society, the madman found himself separated from the sane. That book ends with the medicalization of madness at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Psychiatric Power continues this discourse up to the end of the nineteenth century, and the double "depsychiatrization" of madness, now dispersed between the neurologist and the psychoanalyst. Presented in a conversational tone, Psychiatric Power brings fresh access and light to the work of one of the past century's preeminent thinkers.
Synopsis
Three years before his death Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that have remained relatively unknown until only recently. Entitled Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, these lectures provides the missing link between Foucaults early work on sexuality and punishment and his later work on Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the 20th century, Foucault traces how the early ethical acts of truth-telling in ancient Greece gradually metamorphosed into acts of self-incrimination in monastic times and ultimately into the birth and rise of psychiatry as the foundation of modern penology, criminology, and criminal justice. For Foucault, self-incrimination no longer did the work necessary to quell justice because, by the 19th century, we wanted to know more than just the fact of wrongdoing, we wanted to know who the criminal was: not just whether the accused committed the crime, but what it was about him that made him commit the crime. An avowal of wrong-doing was no longer sufficient—psychiatric expertise was now necessary—and that development marks the birth of discipline and modern criminal justice made so famous by Foucault
Synopsis
Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.
About the Author
Michel Foucault (1926–84) was one of the most significant social theorists of the twentieth century, his influence extending across many areas of the humanities and social sciences.
Fabienne Brion is professor in the School of Law and Criminology at the Catholic University of Louvain.
Bernard E. Harcourt is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.
Stephen W. Sawyer is chair of the History Department and cofounder of the History, Law, and Society Program at the American University of Paris. He is the translator of Michel Foucault’s Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Foreword: François Ewald and Alessandro Montana
Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson
Translators Note
One: 7 November 1973
The space of the asylum and disciplinary order. — Therapeutic process and “moral treatment.”— Scenes of curing. — Changes made by the course from the approach of Histoire de la folie; 1. From an analysis of “representations” to an “analytics of power”; 2. From “violence” to the “microphysics of power”; 3. From “institutional regularities” to the “arrangements” of power.
Two: 14 November 1973
Scene of a cure: George III. From the “macrophysics of sovereignty” to the “microphysics of disciplinary power.” The new figure of the madman. — Little encyclopedia of scenes of cures. — The practice of hypnosis and hysteria. — The psychoanalytic scene; the antipsychiatric scene. — Mary Barnes at Kingsley Hall. — Manipulation of madness and stratagem of truth: Mason Cox.
Three: 21 November 1973
Genealogy of “disciplinary power.” The “power of sovereignty.” The subject-function in disciplinary power and in the power of sovereignty. — Forms of disciplinary power: army, police, apprenticeship, workshop, school. —Disciplinary power as “normalizing agency.” — Technology of disciplinary power and constitution of the “individual.” — Emergence of the human sciences.
Four: 28 November 1973
Elements for a history of disciplinary apparatuses: religious communities in the Middle Ages; pedagogical colonization of youth; the Jesuit missions to Paraguay; the army; workshops; workers cities. — The formalization of these apparatuses in Jeremy Benthams model of the Panopticon. — The family institution and emergence of the Psy-function.
Five: 5 December 1973
The asylum and the family. From interdiction to confinement. The break between the asylum and the family. — The asylum; a curing machine. — Typology of “corporal apparatuses (appareils corporels)”. — The madman and the child. — Clinics (maisons de santé). — Disciplinary apparatuses and family power.
Six: 12 December 1973
Constitution of the child as target of psychiatric intervention. — A family-asylum utopia: the Clermont-en-Oise asylum. — From psychiatry as “ambiguous master” of reality and truth in proto-psychiatric practices to psychiatry as “agent of intensification” of reality. — Psychiatric power and discourse of truth. — The problem of simulation and the insurrection of the hysterics. — The question of the birth of psychoanalysis.
Seven: 19 December 1973
Psychiatric power. — A treatment by François Leuret and its strategic elements: 1—creating an imbalance of power; 2—the ruse of language; 3—the management of needs; 4—the statement of truth. — The pleasure of illness. — The asylum apparatus (dispositif).
Eight: 9 January 1974
Psychiatric power and the practice of “direction”. — The game of “reality” in the asylum. — The asylum, a medically demarcated space and the question of its medical or administrative direction. — The tokens of psychiatric knowledge: ( a ) the technique of questioning; ( b ) the interplay of medication and punishment; ( c ) the clinical presentation. —Asylum “microphysics of power.” — Emergence of the Psy-function and of neuropathology. — The triple destiny of psychiatric power.
Nine: 16 January 1974
The modes of generalization of psychiatric power and the psychiatrization of childhood. — 1. The theoretical specification of idiocy. The criterion of development. — Emergence of a psychopathology of idiocy and mental retardation. — Édouard Seguin: instinct and abnormality. — 2. The institutional annexation of idiocy by psychiatric power. — T he “moral treatment” of idiots: Seguin. — The process of confinement and the stigmatization of the dangerousness of idiots. — Recourse to the notion of degeneration.
Ten: 23 January 1974
Psychiatric power and the question of truth: questioning and confession; magnetism and hypnosis; drugs. — Elements for a history of truth: 1. The truth-event and its forms: judicial, alchemical and medical practices. — Transition to a technology of demonstrative truth. Its elements: ( a ) procedures of inquiry; ( b ) institution of a subject of knowledge; ( c ) ruling out the crisis in medicine and psychiatry and its supports: the disciplinary space of the asylum, recourse to pathological anatomy; relationships between madness and crime. — Psychiatric power and hysterical resistance.
Eleven: 30 January 1974
The problem of diagnosis in medicine and psychiatry. — The place of the body in psychiatric nosology: the model of general paralysis. — The fate of the notion of crisis in medicine and psychiatry. — The test of reality in psychiatry and its forms: 1. Psychiatric questioning (linterrogatoire) and the confession. The ritual of clinical presentation. Note on “pathological heredity” and degeneration. — 2. Drugs. Moreau de Tours and hasish. Madness and dreams. — 3. Magnetism and hypnosis. The discovery of the “neurological body.”
Twelve: 6 February 1974
The emergence of the neurological body: Broca and Duchenne de Boulogne. — Illnesses of differential diagnosis and illnesses of absolute diagnosis. — The model of “general paralysis” and the neuroses. — The battle of hysteria: 1. The organization of a “symptomatological scenario.” — 2. The maneuver of the “functional mannequin” and hypnosis. The question of simulation. — 3. Neurosis and trauma. The irruption of the sexual body.
Course Summary
Course Context
Index of Names
Index of Notions
Index of Places