When reading Madness & Civilization, know that a lot of people considered normal today would have been diagnosed mad in previous centuries. For example, Foucault spends a great deal of time discussing melancholics, known today as people suffering from depression.
Anyway, finished reading Madness & Civilization. The closing of chapter IX, "The Birth of the Asylum", includes this wonderful sentence--the parentheticals are mine:
He (Freud) did deliver the patient from the existence of the asylum within which his "liberators" had alienated him; but he did not deliver him from what was essential in this existence; he regrouped its (the asylum's) powers, extended them to the maximum by uniting them in the doctor's hands; he created the psychoanalytical situation where, by an inspired short-circuit, alienation becomes disalienating because, in the doctor, it becomes a subject.1
Here, I think Foucault is saying something like this: The structures and practices of the asylum gave doctors moral authority over the mad; doctors objectified the mad in those asylums, thereby alienating them, making them outsiders in the real world of reason. But once patient care fell to psychiatry--most notably with Sigmund Freud--doctors' authority transferred from those structures to the personage of the doctor. The doctor then exercised his authority in the psychiatrist's office. There, the alienation that was, in the asylum, only a side effect of being the anomaly became itself a neurosis to be studied and speculated on.
Pure rad.
His arguments probably don't play well when taken in pieces like this, but one can see how rich the content of his writing is. I could spend three days unpacking this one sentence and still not feel the thing fully fleshed out.
I think the prevailing opinion is that Foucault was not much of a writer. I disagree, although I have only translations to judge by.
1"Madness & Civilization" by Michel Foucault
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