The work of Michel Foucault (1926 -1984) continues to be one of the most important intellectual references for understanding the relationship between society and mental disorders. For Foucault, the categories of madness, delinquency or sexual deviation are built based on political discourses to normalize. From this perspective, it is necessary to take into account that being different is not the same as being sick.
The fundamental question that Foucault asks himself, and it should be noted that he asks it when he is still a young student who is finishing his training at the Sainte Anne Hospital in Paris, can hardly be clearer and more directed to the root of the issue than concerns us: “I had also followed studies in psychopathology, a so-called discipline that did not teach much. Then the question arose: how can such little knowledge carry so much power?” (1975).
Foucault wonders why society delegates such great power to mental health professionals, and wonders if it is not because they fulfill a certain function of social control at the service of the interests of the system, not so much because of the value of their knowledge scientists, who, as he will point out in his works, have been very scarce in some historical stages, without this having diminished their power in the least.
For Foucault (1973, 2003) psychiatric diagnosis is not something objective, neutral, but is linked to what he called “biopolitics” (1979), which would be the attempt by power to control health, hygiene, food, sexuality, birth since they constitute political issues, mainly since the eighteenth century. Foucault also introduces (1966) the concept of “episteme” which would be the structure of thought proper to each historical period. Thus, psychiatry is not an exact science, but is conditioned by the episteme of the historical moment. By itself, as cross-cultural psychiatry demonstrates (and Karen Horney already pointed out with great acuity in the 50s), we still do not even have a definition of what mental health or mental disorder is, because it depends on the social and cultural context, obviously linked to power relations.
In one of his first books “History of madness in classical times” (1964) Foucault points out that in the Middle Ages madness was considered a sacred mystery that was part of the vast field of human experience. Likewise, in the Renaissance it was seen as a special form of reason of an ironic type that showed the absurdity of the world. The madness was both tragic and comic. This image crystallizes in the ship of the crazy, a group of people who were outside of society, but who were also considered pilgrims in search of reason and by extension of the reason of the world, representing the connection between order and chaos. As Downing (2008) points out, Foucault argues that in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, madness was seen as an integral human phenomenon. Madness was opposed to reason, but as an alternative human mode of existence, not as its simple rejection. In this line he sees “The Praise of Folly” by Erasmus or Shakespeare’s tragedies. Until the Enlightenment, madness was seen as an imaginary place, a place of passage between the world and what lies behind it, between life and death, between the tangible and the sacred.
When the Classical Age arrived (17th and 18th centuries) the great change took place, since madness became unreasonable, something linked to the inhuman, the opposite of the rational in the Cartesian approach. With the advent of modern therapy, the madman returns to society but is subjected to moral therapy. Thus Foucault criticizes the figure of Pinel, object of great admiration in the history of psychiatry, since he freed the insane of Bicêtre from their chains in 1793 or the figure of Samuel Tuke in England who founded a Quaker asylum for the insane. As Downing (2008) points out, for Foucault neither one nor the other were properly philanthropists, nor did they introduce a humanitarian turn to the treatment of madness, as the history of psychiatry has shown us. Thus, he considers that Tuke’s treatment actually had a strong component of bourgeois morality since what he sought was that the behavior of the alienated person did not disturb the morality of society. For Foucault, Tuke substitutes the terror of madness for the anguish of bourgeois morality. As is known, Tuke organized “tea parties” where he taught the crazy people to show themselves in a polite way and according to established social norms. For Foucault, in reality, Tuke does not allow them to express themselves. For his part, in relation to Pinel, Foucault considers that the asylum in which the insane continue to be kept is also a regime of authority. The madman is now free from his chains, but he is a prisoner of bourgeois morality
After all these changes another one of great relevance occurs: at the end of the Enlightenment, the madman becomes “mentally ill”. But the doctor’s authority is not scientific, it is the authority conferred by society. In this way, the use of the term disease legitimizes the work of the doctor. As Dawning (2008) points out for Foucault, since the Enlightenment, the new social space of madness has become an object of knowledge. The character of the doctor, the psychiatrist, the psychologist, constitutes the subject of this knowledge.
But how valid is the work of Michel Foucault in today’s profoundly globalized world, in the information society, in a society subjected to the psychiatrization of the DSM? New authors, such as the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Ham, argue that we are moving from a disciplinary society to a performance society (the entrepreneurial paradigm, “yes, we can”) and a self-exploitation society, a society in which new forms of biopolitics are emerging. We are moving from the society of the walls of psychiatric hospitals and prisons, to the society of gyms and shopping centers, in which depression occupies an increasingly relevant space.
It is to discuss all these ideas in depth and in a space of freedom, for which we have organized a conference entitled “Biopolitics, 30 years later”, on Friday March 7 in the Aula Magna of the University of Barcelona, with the collaboration of the PUBLIC GAZETTE. Tomás Ibáñez, Federico Javaloy, Miguel Morey, Jorge de los Santos, Joseba Achotegui, Toni Talarn, María Palacín and Josep Baptista Trobalón took part
No registration is required and admission is free. We wait for you!!!!
PROGRAM
http://www.ub.edu/psicologia/images/A__Foucault_2014__Programa_30_años.pdf