History of madness
When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.
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- Couldn't agree more...but which philosophical circles!? When I attended college a couple years ago it seemed like Foucault was either all the rage (to those who liked "continental" philosophy) or simply not discussed (in the "analytic" philosophical circles); he was lambasted almost exclusively by those who had heard some sketchy third party synopsis of his thought and reacted negatively and never bothered to actually comprehend his ideas.
I think the NYT quote on the back of many of the english paperback editions of his works, "Foucault must be reckoned with," sums up his position in the history of philosophy perfectly--his ideas were quite radical and not easy to contend with at first (especially from the perspective of anglo-american pedagogy), but the level of scholarly thinking and ingenuity the man possessed are awe-inducing.
His thesis History of Madness is still an incredible read and really drives home the often great degree of malleability and historical contingency of cultural/social concepts and categories.
- >In having the photographs, it’s hoped we can show that they were made with care and precision for the benefit of the patients – not necessarily to harm.
In every depiction of the lunatic asylum, and as seems clear from history, it's obvious that the goal of interventions is improvement - of the patient, of society by their confinement, and so on. One can desire to do good and still perpetuate unspeakable cruelty and harm.
Shockingly, no mention of Foucault's "History of Madness", which I love and is well worth reading if you are as interested in this subject as I. Foucault says these institutions began primarily as a moral category, and that confinement was a way to isolate the "unreason" of the mad from society in an age of Reason.
The modern medical tradition certainly inherits from this moral categorization. The patient is depraved, sick, different, needs to be "corrected".
One of the great confrontations that needs to be made in this century is with the idea of the "normative", of the singular human that everyone must be measured against (and somehow found wanting), a prominent tent-pole of our modern understanding of humanity. The "normative" needs to be replaced with the garden - humans, like all life, are a basket of diversity. We differ from each other in our very natures; forcing us all towards an ideal, "correcting" our sicknesses so we all become alike in thought, is the wrong model for us.
- If you are really interested in this subject (how western societies treat the "insane" as the societies themselves evolve) I would recommend Michel Foucault's "Madness and Civilization", more recently published as "History of Madness". It's a very long book and I must confess I only got through about two thirds of it, but it certainly opened my eyes into how definitions of what it meant to be "sane" have changed over time.
- An article about the status/role/context of insanity and society which doesn't mention Foucault's work? Published in the year of my birth (1961), which I like to think is a coincidence...
Foucault M. History of Madness. Khalfa J, editor, translator & Murphy J, translator. New York: Routledge; 2006. ISBN 0-415-27701-9.
- It might help to borrow a smidge from Foucault's History of Madness. What impact does labelling have beyond a purely descriptive belief? Is there an ideological conflict between what is mad and what is not?
The simplest example that comes to mind is hysteria. We can easily see how this well discussed ‘ailment’ was actually an undercurrent of misogyny and class warfare.
This goes hand in hand with the various forms of dysfunctional medicalization over the years. From Lombroso to the medicalization of the woman, the African American, the Jewish Race, etc.
There appears much more at stake than benevolent labelling.
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