By Michel Foucault
Western reason's silencing of madness
Subject
Themes
When leprosy vanished from Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the 19,000 leprosariums that had dotted the continent slowly emptied. But the structures of exclusion, the moral meanings attached to the outcast, and the rituals of segregation did not disappear. They waited for a new incarnation, and madness would fill that void.
When leprosy vanished from Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the 19,000 leprosariums that had dotted the continent slowly emptied. But the structures of exclusion, the moral meanings attached to the outcast, and the rituals of segregation did not disappear. They waited for a new…
Published in France in 1961 as Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie a l'age classique, and translated into English in an abridged edition in 1965, this work arrived at a moment when the institutions of psychiatry were facing unprecedented scrutiny. The anti-psychiatry movement, associated with…
The central methodological commitment is to write not the history of psychiatric knowledge but the "archaeology of silence." Modern psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness, a discourse built upon the foundation of a broken dialogue. Before the classical age, the man of reason and the man…
The Great Confinement of the seventeenth century was not a medical event but a moral and political one. The founding of the Hopital General in 1656, and the simultaneous appearance of workhouses, houses of correction, and Zuchthaeuser across Europe, created a new moral geography in which poverty,…
The standard narrative of psychiatric history presents a story of progress. In the dark ages of confinement, the mad were chained alongside criminals, treated as animals, and left to rot in dungeons. Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, enlightened reformers like Pinel in France and Tuke in…
A remarkable pattern runs through the history of Western attitudes toward the socially deviant: the structures of exclusion persist even when the populations they were designed to exclude disappear. When leprosy vanished from Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the 19,000…
The relationship between madness and art underwent a profound transformation across the period covered by this history. During the Renaissance, madness and artistic creation existed in a relationship of mutual illumination. Bosch's paintings gave unreason a rich visual language; Erasmus's Praise of…
At the close of the Middle Ages, leprosy vanished from Europe. The 19,000 leprosariums that had once dotted Christendom slowly emptied, and by the fifteenth century even the great Parisian houses of Saint-Germain and Saint-Lazare held almost no lepers. Yet the structures of exclusion did not…
In 1656, a royal decree founded the Hopital General in Paris. This was not a hospital in any medical sense but an instrument of social order, operating between police and justice. Its directors held extraordinary powers: they could try, judge, and execute decisions outside the ordinary courts.…
Within the houses of confinement, the insane occupied a peculiar position. One-tenth of all arrests for the Hopital General concerned "demented" persons, individuals of "wandering mind," and those who had "become completely mad." Yet no meaningful distinction separated these people from libertines,…
The savage danger of madness, in the classical understanding, was intimately related to the danger of the passions and their fatal concatenation. Sauvages attributed madness to "our blind surrender to our desires, our incapacity to control or to moderate our passions," listing the resulting…
Classical thought recognised madness through several specific faces, each combining mythical residues with emerging medical observation. The most enduring diagnostic pair was mania and melancholia. Melancholia had been defined since the sixteenth century both by its symptoms and by its supposed…
The therapeutics of madness developed entirely outside the hospital. The houses of confinement existed to segregate and correct, not to cure. Yet in the world beyond their walls, an elaborate system of treatments evolved throughout the classical period, aimed at the whole person, addressing the…
In the middle of the eighteenth century, a new fear gripped Europe. The houses of confinement, built to contain unreason and preserve social order, now seemed to breed disease. People spoke of prison fevers spreading into cities, of tainted air seeping through the walls of Bicetre and contaminating…
Every nineteenth-century psychiatrist yielded to the same impulse of indignation: "No one blushed to put the insane in prison." Esquirol catalogued the fortresses and houses of correction where the mad were still chained beside criminals. Reil groaned over wretches "thrown, like State criminals,…
The familiar images of psychiatric liberation are deceptive. Samuel Tuke's Retreat, near York, suggested not a prison but a large farm, surrounded by a walled garden with no bars on the windows. A visitor observed that "it is not at all the idea of a prison that it suggests, but rather that of a…
By Michel Foucault
Subject
Themes
When leprosy vanished from Europe between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the 19,000 leprosariums that had dotted the continent slowly emptied. But the structures of exclusion, the moral meanings attached to the outcast, and the rituals of segregation did not disappear. They waited for a new incarnation, and madness would fill that void.