Psychiatric Power

In this new addition to the Collège de France Lecture Series Michel Foucault explores the birth of psychiatry, examining Western society's division of 'mad' and 'sane' and how medicine and law influenced these attitudes. This seminal new work by a leading thinker of the modern age opens new vistas within historical and philosophical study.

Institutionalizing Gender analyzes the relationship between class, gender, and psychiatry in France from 1789 to 1900, an era noteworthy for the creation of the psychiatric profession, the development of a national asylum system, and the spread of bourgeois gender values. Asylum doctors in nineteenth-century France promoted the notion that manliness was synonymous with rationality, using this "fact" to pathologize non-normative behaviors and confine people who did not embody mainstream gender expectations to asylums. And yet, this gendering of rationality also had the power to upset prevailing dynamics between men and women. Jessie Hewitt argues that the ways that doctors used dominant gender values to find "cures" for madness inadvertently undermined both medical and masculine power—in large part because the performance of gender, as a pathway to health, had to be taught; it was not inherent. Institutionalizing Gender examines a series of controversies and clinical contexts where doctors' ideas about gender and class simultaneously legitimated authority and revealed unexpected opportunities for resistance. Thanks to generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, through The Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellopen.org) and other repositories.

Drawing on a broad range of approaches in the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, history, philosophy, medicine and nursing, Power and the Psychiatric Apparatus exposes psychiatric practices that are mobilized along the continuum of repression, transformation and assistance. It critically examines taken for granted psychiatric practices both past and current, shedding light on the often political nature of psychiatry and reconceptualizing its central and sensitive issues through the radical theory of figures such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Goffman, and Szasz. As such, this ground-breaking collection embraces a broad understanding of psychiatric practices and engages the reader in a critical understanding of their effects, challenging the discipline’s altruistic rhetoric of therapy and problematizing the ways in which this is operationalized in practice. A comprehensive exploration of contested psychiatric practices in healthcare settings, this interdisciplinary volume brings together recent scholarship from the US, Canada, the UK, Europe and Australia, to provide a rich array of theoretical tools with which to engage with questions related to psychiatric power, discipline and control, while theorizing their workings in creative and imaginative ways.

In the years between 1900 and 1930, American psychiatrists transformed their profession from a marginal science focused primarily on the care of the mentally ill into a powerful discipline concerned with analyzing the common difficulties of everyday life. How did psychiatrists effect such a dramatic change in their profession's fortunes and aims? Here, Elizabeth Lunbeck examines how psychiatry grew to take the whole world of human endeavor as its object.

This book challenges the perception of the psychiatric chart as a neutral and objective text. The chapters included in this book coalesce to reveal the psychiatric chart as a text that is, in fact, “storied” by institutional ideology that reflects, reinforces, reinterprets, and, at times, resists gendered, raced, sexualized, and classed norms, values, and presuppositions. Intersectional analysis highlights the nuanced ways in which dominant ideologies are activated in chart documentation to produce qualitatively specific psychiatric narratives of distress and related responses in the psychiatric institution. The book serves as a much-needed resource for mental health professionals, education and training programs, and researchers that meaningfully takes into account the social and structural materiality of people’s lives and its impact on experiences of distress. It will also appeal to scholars investigating equity in health care across the fields of Critical Psychology, Disability Studies, Social Work, Allied Health, Mad Studies and Social Justice.

Drawing on a broad range of approaches in the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, history, philosophy, medicine and nursing, Power and the Psychiatric Apparatus exposes psychiatric practices that are mobilized along the continuum of repression, transformation and assistance. It critically examines taken for granted psychiatric practices both past and current, shedding light on the often political nature of psychiatry and reconceptualizing its central and sensitive issues through the radical theory of figures such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Goffman, and Szasz. As such, this ground-breaking collection embraces a broad understanding of psychiatric practices and engages the reader in a critical understanding of their effects, challenging the discipline’s altruistic rhetoric of therapy and problematizing the ways in which this is operationalized in practice. A comprehensive exploration of contested psychiatric practices in healthcare settings, this interdisciplinary volume brings together recent scholarship from the US, Canada, the UK, Europe and Australia, to provide a rich array of theoretical tools with which to engage with questions related to psychiatric power, discipline and control, while theorizing their workings in creative and imaginative ways.

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France before his death in 1984. In this course, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditionsbased on courage and conviction.