Gauchet / Swain Madness and Democracy

The Modern Psychiatric Universe
Core Textbook
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2287-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 360 Seiten

Reihe: New French Thought Series

How the insane asylum became a laboratory of democracy is revealed in this provocative look at the treatment of the mentally ill in nineteenth-century France. Political thinkers reasoned that if government was to rest in the hands of individuals, then measures should be taken to understand the deepest reaches of the self, including the state of madness. Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain maintain that the asylum originally embodied the revolutionary hope of curing all the insane by saving the glimmer of sanity left in them. Their analysis of why this utopian vision failed ultimately constitutes both a powerful argument for liberalism and a direct challenge to Michel Foucault's indictment of liberal institutions.

The creation of an artificial environment was meant to encourage the mentally ill to live as social beings, in conditions that resembled as much as possible those prevailing in real life. The asylum was therefore the first instance of a modern utopian community in which a scientifically designed environment was supposed to achieve complete control over the minds of a whole category of human beings. Gauchet and Swain argue that the social domination of the inner self, far from being the hidden truth of emancipation, represented the failure of its overly optimistic beginnings.

Madness and Democracy combines rich details of nineteenth-century asylum life with reflections on the crucial role of subjectivity and difference within modernism. Its final achievement is to show that the lessons learned from the failure of the asylum led to the rise of psychoanalysis, an endeavor focused on individual care and on the cooperation between psychiatrist and patient. By linking the rise of liberalism to a chapter in the history of psychiatry, Gauchet and Swain offer a fascinating reassessment of political modernity.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gauchet, Marcel

Swain, Gladys

Weitere Mitwirkende

Seigel, Jerrold E.

Porter, Catherine

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sozialphilosophie, Politische Philosophie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Foreword

Editor's Note

Introduction 3

Abstract I: The Moment of Origin 19

Pt. 1 Advent, Apotheosis, and Failure of the Asylum Establishment

Abstract II 23

Ch. I La Salpetriere, or The Double Birth of the Asylum 25

Ch. II The Politics of the Asylum 49

Ch. III Impossible Power 84

Ch. IV A Socializing Machine 100

Abstract III: Crisis, Agony, and Repetition 145

Abstract IV: Esquirol at La Salpetriere 145

Pt. 2 The Passions as a Sketch of a General Theory of Mental Alienation

Abstract V: Esqirol in 1805 149

Abstract VI: The Clinical Resolution 149

Abstract VII: Between the Will to Madness and Brain Lesions 149

Abstract VIII: What the Passions Make It Possible to Think (Beginning) 150

Ch. V What the Passions Make It Possible to Think 151

Ch. VI Reducing Insanity: The Mirror of Alterity 163

Abstract IX: Approaches to Healing; How to Speak to the Insane 167

Ch. VII The Society of Individuals and the Institution of Speech 169

Ch. VIII The Conquest of Dissymmetry 194

Ch. IX Openings and Aporia of Moral Treatment 230

Epilogue: Social Divide, Division of the Subject, Mad Rupture 255

Notes 283

List of Works Cited 311

Index 317

Über Autor(innen)

Marcel Gauchet is the editor of Le Débat and the author of The Disenchantment of the World (Princeton). Gladys Swain was a practicing psychiatrist and the author of Dialogue avec l'insensé (Gallimard).