A re-evaluation of the modern psychiatric hospital from the standpoint of the Kyoto school's critique of modernity.

Abstract

Michel Foucault defines the modern psychiatric hospital as an institution of power that excludes and disciplines those who are deemed immoral, perverse, or abnormal in society. Rather than a facility for healing, as Foucault has taught us, the psychiatric hospital operates more as a punitive method of the body. But what is not considered in Foucault's historical account of the psychiatric institution are the epistemological preconditions that allowed for its original formation. Drawing on the Kyoto School philosophers' critique of modernity, this article will discuss how the biomedical model underlying modern psychiatric care is rooted in a prior epistemological duality that was developed even earlier within Western intellectual history-a duality we will call the "epistemology of nihilism." Foucault's political technology of the body is therefore a symptom of the epistemology of nihilism, that which leads to consequences beyond mere panoptical surveillance. This article will discuss such consequences, in particular the mechanization of human life derived from the excesses of scientific technology, in the service of introducing a new way of thinking about the limits of psychiatric treatment in today's world.