Foucault on Psychiatric Power
Details
Hi all,
This is Alex Conway. Some of you may know me as a regular attendee of Philip’s groups. Philip will be away for the next three weeks, so I’ll be filling in for him during this time slot (starting on Friday Oct 30).
I’ll be running a group studying Michel Foucault’s lecture series Psychiatric Power. There are three lectures in the middle of the series that I find absolutely fascinating, and we’ll work through one each week.
I’m looking forward to sharing these lectures with you all. They reveal a lovely niche of Foucault’s thought that, in my opinion, is neglected by commentators.
Best,
Alex
--------------------------------------------
Find the text here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jQdKU4YP1mhXc_qraSzyrPYFn6q0wvDJ/view?usp=drive_link
Reading Schedule
October 30th
- Lecture six, pages 123-142
Supplemental article on Hysteria:
November 6th
- Lecture seven, pages 143-171
November 13th
- Lecture eight, pages pages 174-199
Artwork: Spain Dream Revisited, Colin Middleton (1938)
--------------------------------------------
About the text (from the publisher):
In Psychiatric Power, the fourth volume in the collection of his groundbreaking lectures at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault addresses and expands upon the ideas in his seminal Madness and Civilization, sketching the genealogy of psychiatry and of its characteristic form of power/knowledge. Madness and Civilization undertook the archeology of the division according to which, in Western Society, the madman found himself separated from the sane. That book ends with the medicalization of madness at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Psychiatric Power continues this discourse up to the end of the nineteenth century, and the double "depsychiatrization" of madness, now dispersed between the neurologist and the psychoanalyst. Presented in a conversational tone, Psychiatric Power brings fresh access and light to the work of one of the past century's preeminent thinkers.