Michel Foucault’s Phänomenologie des Krankengeistes

Abstract

Abstract The reactions of professional historians to Foucault’s Histoire de la folie 2 seem, at first reading, ambivalent, not to say polarized.3 There are many acknowledgments of its seminal role, beginning with Robert Mandrou’s early review in Annales, characterizing it as a “beautiful book” that will be “of central importance for our understanding of the Classical period.”4 Twenty years later, Michael MacDonald confirmed Mandrou’s prophecy: “Anyone who writes about the history of insanity in early modern Europe must travel in the spreading wake of Michel Foucault’s famous book, Madness and Civilization. 5 Later endorsements have been even stronger. Jan Goldstein: “For both their empirical content and their powerful theoretical perspectives, the works of Michel Foucault occupy a special and central place in the historiography of psychiatry.”6 Roy Porter: “Time has proved Madness and Civilization far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of madness.”7 More specifically, Foucault has recently been heralded as a prophet of “the new cultural history.”8