about "Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973-1974" by Michel Foucault

In these lectures, Foucault defines psychiatric power as "that supplement of power by which the real is imposed on madness in the name of a truth possessed once and for all by this power in the name of medical science, of psychiatry". This definition hints at the areas Foucault explores: reality and truth, systems of power, and the disciplines of science and the human sciences. The lectures serve as an important follow up and, in some key respects, an amendment to his early work, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Reading this and staying engaged was a struggle. The reason for that is largely a matter of context: the practice of psychiatry (and administration of asylums) and the schools of thought therein have a complicated and rich history in Europe, particularly in France and Italy. Foucault digs into and entrenches himself in that history, but, as a student, there is no required preliminary reading to reference. Nevertheless, Foucault does impart many insightful points of brilliance:

• The appropriation and use of reality as a form of power

• The medicalization of children, and the creation and expansion of the concept of development as it pertains to rationality and moralizing, retardation, madness, and defining the normal and abnormal

• Foucault's redefining the abnormal, the retarded, etc, as individuals who act on instinct

• How psychiatry changed from a practice that confined, controlled, and sometimes corrected madness to a power that defines, controls, and sometimes corrects the abnormal, thereby expanding its power into the domain of normality

• The role of psychiatry and asylum administration in capitalism and maintenance of the workforce

• How medical science provides justification and grounds for power, but does not inform psychiatric practice

• The history of the concept of truth, and truth's development and role in science

This is not be a good starting read for people interested in Foucault. And people interested in pschiatry (or anti-psychiatry) should probably also not read this without some background in Foucault.

Note

• The edition I have does offer some good historical context on psychiatry.

Quick Thrill

If I had to choose one by Foucault, I'd take Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison over his more noted Madness and Civilization. I seek the same kind of satisfaction from both, but they are very different in approach and style.

Now over two-thirds into the book, this week I read chapter VII, "The Great Fear". Heading into the 1800's, Foucault here describes how the public imagination began to see madness as "the strange contradiction of human appetites: the complicity of desire and murder, of cruelty and the longing to suffer, of sovereignty and slavery, insult and humiliation". This conception inspired both fear and attraction to the mad and to the houses in which they dwell.

And still every Halloween people flock to haunted houses in search of a thrill.

Moral Charge

"The Great Confinement", the first chapter of Michael Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, traces early reactions to a set of people, including the mad, whose common condition was idleness. His tracing includes a discussion of the role of Europe’s churches; with the aid of the Church, houses of confinement, which frequently doubled as work houses (sources of cheap labor), had a moral charge to assign labor and condemn the idle. Armed with a moral charge, they operated without oversight, without checks on their power, without critical analysis of their judgments because they had the faith of the state. Idleness was a sin, the reasoning went; because of Original Sin men were condemned to labor forever, Earth being no longer a paradise fit to sustain him without aid of his toils.

Recently I attended church and heard this Gospel:

Mt 5:13-16
Jesus said to his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt has lost its strength, how can it be made salty again? It has become useless. It can only be thrown away and people will trample on it.

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a mountain cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and covers it; instead it is put on a lampstand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way your light must shine before others, so that they may see the good you do and praise your Father in heaven."