Psychiatric Power Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973--1974

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.   

Foreword: François Ewald and Alessandro Montana

Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson

Translator’s 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 Bentham’s 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 (l’interrogatoire) 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

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