Synopses & Reviews
In this new addition to the College de France lecture series, Michel Foucault's historical enquiry into the uses and techniques of power and knowledge finds itself directed towards a study of the birth of psychiatry. Psychiatric Power shows not only how Western society's division of the mad from the sane began, but also how society, medicine, and law and their treatment of the mad developed into what we now recognize as modern psychiatry, and how modern social and political attitudes towards madness developed. A seminal work by this leading thinker of the modern age, Psychiatric Power builds on Foucault's published writings while opening new vistas within historical and philosophical study. Michael Foucault, acknowledged as the preeminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines.
Arnold I. Davidson is Professor at the University of Chicago and the University of Pisa. He is the author of The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts and co-editor of the anthology Michel Foucault: Philosophie. Translator Graham Burchell has written essays on Michel Foucault and was an editor of The Foucault Effect. Madness and Civilization undertook the archaeology 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. Michel Foucault's 1973/1974 course, Psychiatric Power, pursues this history whilst reorienting his project: in this course Foucault sketches the genealogy of psychiatry, of its characteristic form of power/knowledge. In order to give an account of this form of psychiatric and medical knowledge about madness, one must start from an analysis of the apparatuses and the techniques of power that organized the treatment of the mad in the period that spans from Philippe Pinel to Jean-Martin Charcot. Psychiatry is not born as a consequence of progress in the knowledge of madness but from the disciplinary apparatuses within which the regime imposed on madness is organized. From this point of view, Psychiatric Power continues the project of a history of the human sciences. The course concludes at the end of the nineteenth century at the moment of the double depsychiatrization of madness, now dispersed between the neurologist and the psychoanalyst. The summary of the course at the end of this volume contains the core of what Foucault perhaps didn't have time to discuss in the course itself. Taken in its entirety, Psychiatric Power goes so far as to propose a genealogy of the antipsychiatric movements which so marked the 1960s. In this new addition to the College de France lecture series, Michel Foucault's historical enquiry into the uses and techniques of power and knowledge finds itself directed towards a study of the birth of psychiatry. Psychiatric Power shows not only how Western society's division of the mad from the sane began, but also how society, medicine, and law and their treatment of the mad developed into what we now recognize as modern psychiatry, and how modern social and political attitudes towards madness developed. A seminal work by this leading thinker of the modern age, Psychiatric Power builds on Foucault's published writings while opening new vistas within historical and philosophical study.
Review
Praise for Michel Foucault:
"[Foucault] must be reckoned with by humanists, social scientists, and political activists."--The New York Times Book Review
"Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are...[His work 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
Synopsis
In this new addition to the Collège de France lecture series, Michel Foucault's historical enquiry into the uses and techniques of power and knowledge finds itself directed towards a study of the birth of psychiatry.
Psychiatric Power shows not only how Western society's division of the "mad" from the "sane" began, but also how society, medicine, and law and their treatment of the "mad" developed into what we now recognize as modern psychiatry, and how modern social and political attitudes towards madness developed. A seminal work by this leading thinker of the modern age,
Psychiatric Power builds on Foucault's published writings while opening new vistas within historical and philosophical study.
Synopsis
In this new addition to the College de France Lecture Series Michel Foucault explores the birth of psychiatry, examining Western society's division of 'mad' and 'sane' and how medicine and law influenced these attitudes. This seminal new work by a leading thinker of the modern age opens new vistas within historical and philosophical study."
Synopsis
The fourth volume of Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France
Synopsis
The fourth volume of Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France
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.
About the Author
Michael Foucault is acknowledged as the preeminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s.
Series editor Arnold I. Davidson teaches philosophy, divinity, comparative literature, and history of science at the University of Chicago, and is executive director of the journal Critical Inquiry. He is co-editor of the anthology Michel Foucault: Philosophie.
Translator Graham Burchell has written essays on Michel Foucault and was an editor of The Foucault Effect.
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