The power of psychiatry

Le Pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France, 1973-1974

Michel Foucault's course "The Power of Psychiatry" not only continues the study of the distinction between the mentally ill and the non-mentally ill in "History of Madness in the Classical Age," but also proposes a new research project: to draw a genealogy of psychiatry, a genealogy of the forms of "power-knowledge" it constitutes. To achieve this, it is impossible to start from medical knowledge about mental illness, because such knowledge is not operational in practice. We can only explain the problem of verifying mental illness by starting from the various power configurations and techniques organized around mental illness treatment by psychiatrists such as Pinel and Charcot. The birth of psychiatry was not the result of new advances in the understanding of mental illness, but the result of the imposition of various disciplinary devices.
Foucault frequently questioned the falsity of psychiatrists’ discourse, which persists in contemporary forensic practice. From this perspective, The Power of Psychiatry continues the project of a humanistic “scientific” archaeology.
At the end of the 19th century, a dual "depsychiatization" of madness spread among neurologists and psychoanalysts. The course content ends there. But the course outline written by Michel Foucault contains the essence of what he did not have time to elaborate in the course. It can even be said that The Power of Psychiatry proposes a genealogy of the anti-psychiatry movement that became the hallmark of the 1960s.

2022-07-01

上海人民出版社

244

9787208176034