Michel Foucault taught seminars at the College de France from January 1971 until his death in June 1984 under the title "The History of Systems of Thought". This edition based on the words delivered in public by Foucault covers the period between November 1973 and February 1974. Even though both his books and courses share certain themes, the lectures arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's philosophical activities. In these lectures he sets out the program for a genealogy of psychiatry, of its characteristic knowledge/power relations. Thus, Psychiatric Power pursues the history started with Madness and Civilization which undertook the archaeology of the division between the insane and the sane in Western society.

In order to give an account of this form of psychiatric and medical knowledge about madness, one must start with an analysis of the apparatuses and the techniques of power that organized the treatment of the mad in the period that spans from Philippe Pinel to Jean-Martin Charcot. Psychiatry is not born as a consequence of progress in the knowledge of madness but from the disciplinary apparatuses within which the regime imposed on madness is organized. From this point of view, Psychiatric Power continues the project of a history of human sciences.

Michel Foucault's central contribution to political philosophy was his progressive development and refinement of a new conception of power, one that put into question the two reigning conceptions of power, the juridical conception found in classical liberal theories and the Marxist conception organized around the notions of State apparatus, dominant class, mechanisms of conservation and juridical superstructure.  At the beginning of the chapter "Method" in the History of Sexuality Foucault warns his readers against several misunderstandings that may be occasioned by the use of the word "power" such as the identity, the form and the unity of power. Without having yet developed all of the tools of his own analysis, Psychiatric Power already exhibits Foucault's awareness of the shortcomings of available conceptions of power, and nowhere more clearly than in his own critique of notions implicit or explicit in his Psychiatric Power Foucault's dissatisfaction with his previous analysis of asylum power centers around two basic features of the analysis in History of Sexuality: first, the privileged role he gave to the "perception of madness" instead of starting, as he does in Psychiatric Power, from an apparatus of power itself; second, the use of notions that now seem to him to be "rusty locks with which we cannot get very far" and that therefore compromise his analysis of power as it is articulated in Psychiatric Power (p. 13-14).

As it is evident in one of the first theoretical claims about power that Foucault makes in Psychiatric Power, despite its apparent simplicity, already requires an entire reelaboration of our conception of power: "… power is never something that someone possesses, any more than it is something that emanates from someone. Power does not belong to anyone or even to a group; there is only power because there is dispersion, relays, networks, reciprocal supports, differences of potential, discrepancies, etc. It is in this system of differences, which have to be analyzed, that power can begin to function" (p. 4).

This claim is the basis of Foucault's later insistence on the relational character of power and of relationships of resistance that Foucault uses to give his extraordinary historical reinterpretation of the problem of hysteria at the conclusion of Psychiatric Power. When in the final part of his lecture of February 6 Foucault takes up Charcot's treatment of hysterics and what he names "the great maneuvers of hysteria", he announces the angle of analysis he will adopt: "I will not try to analyze this in terms of the history of hysterics any more than in terms of psychiatric knowledge of hysterics, but rather in terms of battle, confrontation, reciprocal encirclement, of the laying of mirror traps, of investment and counter-investment, of struggle for control between doctors and hysterics" (p. 308). To take just one example, Foucault's analytics restores this relational dimension of battle to the great problem of simulation not as a pathological phenomenon, but as a phenomenon of struggle. As a result, from this point of view, hysterical simulation becomes "the militant underside of psychiatric power" and the hysterics can be seen as "the true militants of antipsychiatry" (p. 138 & p. 254).

Moreover, the elaboration of this microphysics of power does not require Foucault to ignore the epistemological dimensions of the history of psychiatry, the discursive practices of psychiatric knowledge. On the contrary, it allows him to place these practices within a political history of truth, to reconnect these practices to the functioning of an apparatus of power, to link them to a level "that would allow discursive practice to be grasped at precisely the point where it is formed" (p. 13). Thus, Psychiatric Power can be read as a kind of experiment in method, one that responds in historical detail to a set of questions that permeated the genealogical period of Foucault's work.

At the very end of his course, when Foucault returns to the relations of power between hysteric and doctor, to hysterical resistance to medical power, the scene of sexuality is center stage. And Foucault draws the remarkable conclusion that "this sexuality is not an indecipherable remainder but the hysteric's victory cry, the last maneuver by which they finally get the better of the neurologists and silence them" (p.322). But, in the final diagnosis, this great pleasure of hysteric's victory becomes the great misfortune of our subjection to the apparatus of sexuality. And Foucault focuses our attention on that moving stratum of force relations that underlies the instability, of relations of power/resistance.

What brought the problem of psychiatric power to the fore no doubt involved the conjunction of two elements: one specific to the conceptual dynamic of Foucault's research and the other arising from the conjuncture of the 1970's. The first lecture envisioned taking as a starting point the present situation of psychiatry in the light of the contribution of antipsychiatry to a reorientation of questions around the "power relations" that conditioned how the asylum institution functioned and governed the forms of medical intervention, and proceeding to a retrospective analysis, starting from the present, of the historical formation of this apparatus of power. This is what gives this way of writing the history of psychiatry its specificity.

The course concludes at the end of the nineteenth century at the moment of the double "depsychiatrization" of madness, now dispersed between the neurologist and the psychoanalyst. Taken in its entirety, Psychiatric Power goes so far as to propose a genealogy of the antipsychiatric movements which so marked the 1960's. Since this is an open public seminars of Foucault, it is accessible to lay people as well as to academics and students of psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, social and political sciences and history.  I believe, this book provides an extremely useful framework for anyone who is interested in doing some future analytic work on Foucault and also in history of psychiatry.  

© 2007 Kamuran Godelek

Kamuran Godelek, Ph.D., Mersin University, School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, Ciftlikkoy, MERSIN, TURKEY

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Categories: Philosophical