[Foucault-L] Psychiatric Power in Disciplinary Society (or, 'World as Asylum')



Here is a selection I have made from Foucault's lectures at the College de France between 1973-4, translated by Graham Burchell, and published by Macmillan in 2006 with the title 'Psychiatric Power.'

The first thing I think that should be said about these lectures, given their title, is that they should be viewed as less about the 'power of psychiatry' and more about the 'psychiatric character of power' (although as soon as I invoke the word 'power' I feel the need to place that loaded word in quotation marks, to bracket it off, so that its meaning is no longer self-evident, and it is allowed to wander in the uncertainty of its meaning. Perhaps a better word here would be 'discipline', with which it is more or less synonymous).

In these lectures Foucault's takes up again some of the themes which he first took up in Histoire de la folie. In some respects, it could be seen as a follow up to that earlier work which took up so much of his energies and represented the culmination of his first efforts (chronologically it begins roughly where that book left off, and, after all, he did say that Histoire de la folie was going to be the first volume of a much larger work), but it can also be seen as prepatory work for his Discipline and Punish (which was published the following year). Here is a link to a selection from the chapter 'The Birth of the Asylum' from Histoire de la folie.

My selection represents an attempt to distill the contents of these lectures so that they can be allowed to express themselves more forceably (of course, it can in no way be said to replace the Macmillan publication, and I can satisfy my conscience for the crime of violating intellectual property laws-- even though the size of my selection falls under 10% of the text-- with the knowledge that, if anything, my dissemination of its contents will only lead to more interest in that publication). I have also added some supplementary material to further augment the text.

Although they are still more or less in a stage of incompleteness, here is the link to a selection I have made from Tuke's Description of the Retreat, and see here for a selection from Pinel's Treatise on Insanity (I will add more material over the next couple of days).

Kind regards, Michael Bibby.
Folow-ups
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