History Of Madness Research Articles

The professional responsibility of doctors and psychiatrists in mental health protection

The history of madness is neither the history of medicine nor that of psychiatry but, to some extent, a non-marginal part of the history of mankind and its societies as they have changed over time, albeit Vichiana-like, with recurring and permanent motifs.

MICHEL FOUCAULT E A FORMAÇÃO DISCURSIVA ACERCA DA LOUCURA: UMA REVISÃO DE LITERATURA

The production of this article is the result of the theoretical maturation provoked by the readings of Foucaultian works. As a consequence, we measure the depth of knowledge of this philosopher who greatly contributed to several areas of knowledge, such as psychology, history, law, biomedicine, among others. In this sense, this study aims to analyze and understand the discursive formation about madness. To achieve this goal, we propose a literature review and focus our efforts on his main work on this topic: The history of madness in the classical age. We also consider articles, dissertations and theses related to the theme, contemplating our methodological design. We used the main search engines in our investigation: Scielo and Google Scholar. Our results point to three different discourses about madness in three different historical periods that Foucault called a condition of possibility. We conclude that, in the Middle Ages, the discourse of madness was based on demonic possession. Already in the classical age, it was understood by discursive formations as a form of error, a daydream. In the 18th century, with the modern age and the scientific contours of the time, madness came to be understood by the medical psychiatrist discourse as a mental illness.

The Joker’s Shifting Face: Eighty Years of Mad History in Batman and American Culture

That “grim jester with a twisted brain,” Batman supervillain the Joker reflects shifting social constructions of mental difference in the US across eight decades. The article reads Batman serial comics, graphic novels, and film against four key moments in Mad History: eugenics, psychiatric survivor activism in the 1960s and 1970s, the trauma discourses of 1980s popular culture, and the criminalization of mental difference in the twenty-first century. Out of this complex conversation four models of madness are derived: toxic reproduction, liberation, mad genius, and the conflation of madness with violent crime. These models work intersectionally: Joker’s madness, queerness, and exceptionally white masculinity engender each other. Because of his distinctive qualities as a visual icon, he makes Mad History more visible, too.

Joelle M. Abi-Rached. ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East.

Joelle M. Abi-Rached. <i>ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East</i>.

Repercussions of admission in hospitals of custody and psychiatric treatment on subjectivity: integrative review of the literature

This study aimed to synthesize the scientific literature produced regarding the process of suppression of human subjectivity in people with mental disorders who have broken the law and are subject to hospitalization in custody and psychiatric treatment hospitals. An integrative review without temporal delimitation was carried out. The searches were carried out by two independent judges in the databases/libraries VHL (Virtual Health Library), LILACS, SciELO and ReP (USP Production Repository). After applying the eligibility criteria, 13 productions were recovered. The literature emphasizes the history of madness and crime, its impacts on society and the consequent social exclusion of individuals institutionalized in custodial hospitals. Even with the Psychiatric Reform, these institutions still employ a protective and hygienist discourse, suppressing the subjectivity of these subjects. The literature asserts the need to strengthen an intersectoral policy, thus promoting comprehensive care for people with mental disorders in conflict with the law.

Public health in historical perspective

It is commonplace to consider the time of the Industrial Revolution as the time of the beginning of the first measures concerning the current concept of Public Health, understood both from the point of view of hygiene measures in the cities to which large quantities of workers from the agricultural world, as well as from the adoption of measures for the prevention, diagnosis and cure of diseases. Before that time, there remains the testimony of authors such as Michel Foucault, who in his study of the History of Madness in the Classical Era described the spaces of exclusion outside the walls of towns or cities, whether leprosy or madness to mention just a few examples, true incarnations of evil, who were feared and isolated outside the community. Our aforementioned author remembers how until the end of the Middle Ages, when Hansen’s disease or Leprosy was eradicated in Europe, there were thousands of leper colonies throughout Christendom. In this article we will therefore go back to the times of the last decades of the 17th century in which a new relationship began to be articulated between the concepts of life and power, through the emergence of a new rationality anchored in the Reason of State, and mercantilism. As a dominant doctrine in different European countries understood as a zero-sum economic game, giving rise to the birth of what is called Biopolitics.1 In this way, life, which becomes the criterion and end of the exercise of power, is the object of a political value judgment, a process that will last until the 20th century with the establishment of the Welfare State, and the measures that were adopted in 1942 according to the guidelines given by Lord Beveridge.

Отчуждение и субъект: Мишель Фуко и Марсель Гоше

The article analyzes the categories of alienation and subject of Michel Foucault and Marcel Gauchet. Their connection with social processes in relation to madness is considered. The tools used for a deeper understanding of the approaches to the concepts of these authors are demonstrated. The reader gets the potential to determine his attitude to the categories due to the “artificial collision” of the methods of philosophers. The introductory part of the work allows you to delve into the postmodern context. In the next section of the article, the phenomenon of madness studied by Foucault in the book “The History of Madness in the Classical Age” is given as an example. Gauchet’s criticism of this work, thanks to which we can conclude that Gauchet reverses Foucault’s logic in relation to madness in general. Explaining his criticism, Gaucher refers to Philippe Pinel. In this section, we can define the criteria invested in the concept of alienation. Next, we explore the process of subjectivation and how exclusion zones are formed. The authors view this process in different ways, and, accordingly, perceptions and assessments also differ. Based on this section in the article, we come to what alienation is expressed for the authors, what connotation they have. In the concluding section of the article, we find that there is a certain connection between the subject and the phenomenon of insanity. Foucault insists that madness is doomed to the exception, and the subject along with it. Gaucher, in his reasoning, takes the position that, thanks to madness, the subject acquires the potential to find himself.

I Am Because They Tell Me I Am: Mental Health and Performativity

This article discusses madness and its production, aiming to circumscribe Butler's performativity and Foucault's Theory of Discourse in the field of mental health. Madness has historically had different conceptions and social functions. In different contexts and cultures, care practices were created to heal, rescue and disalienate. All these practices built modes of subjectivation and ways of controlling what would become mental illness and psychopathology. But what is madness without medical-psychiatric discourse based on biological practices? How to understand madness from a critical epistemology based on the assumptions of applied human and social sciences? Thus, this article has as its methodology a bibliographical review research, having as main references the post-structuralist philosophy and the sociology of health, rescuing the history of madness and its conceptions: critical and tragic, based on Foucault's theory in dialogue with authors classics of the sociology of health. It is also observed how practices of medicalization of madness were systematized in Brazil, with the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) having the principle of universality and equity. With this, it was possible to observe and conclude how the language system and performativity build dissident subjectivities and produce mental patients, insofar as language produces subjects within a pre-established norm, dictating the molds of normal and pathological. The criticism carried out is not just to remove the logic of the biological discourse, but to build epistemologies that find the subject of experience and transform him into a subject of self-knowledge.

¿Quién anuncia el no recurso?: El fort/da en Ser justo con Freud y en el debate entre Derrida y Foucault

Abstract: This article consists of a commentary on Derrida’s essay “To do Justice to Freud: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis”, with the aim of tracing what cannot be re-appropriated by the presuppositions of the Derrida/Foucault debate. By analysing the question “who announces the nonrecourse?”, I will explore the way in which Derrida’s writing is affected by the necessity and impossibility of not repressing unreason. I will defend that Derrida compulsively writes the effects of his own resistance to repress unreason by reproducing the Foucauldian quest for a “beyond of reason”. This repetition compulsion not only keeps re-opening the debate, but more importantly, it triggers the return of unreason as a disarrangement of the principles of identity and linear time which destabilizes any authorial ground for a history of madness in general and for any of its critiques. This article will read the exchanges between Derrida and Foucault by deconstructing the premises of any debate in general.

Foucault Before the Collège de France

This introduction to the special issue ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France’ surveys Foucault’s work in the first part of his career. While there is a familiar chronology to the books he published in the 1960s – from History of Madness to The Archaeology of Knowledge – the story can be developed in relation to his articles, his translations, his early publications and manuscripts, and his teaching. Looking at the programme of posthumous publication of many of his courses and unfinished manuscripts, this introduction discusses key themes, and introduces the papers of the special issue which analyse these texts in detail. It concludes with some general thoughts about what these hitherto neglected or hidden sources tell us about the work of Foucault. Although it adds some cautions about their use, we believe the texts and lectures analysed in this issue and others from the period before the Collège de France add valuable insights into our understanding of Foucault’s intellectual development, his interests and plans, and his enduring influence on a variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences.

First approximations "rioplatenses" (from River Plate) to the History of Madness

Incluye el texto: Algo sobre la enajenación mental (1864), de Pedro Mallo.

The Imaginary Force of History: On Images, the Imaginary, and Myths in Foucault’s Early Works

ABSTRACT In manuscripts and unpublished articles written in the 1950s, Foucault developed a notion of myth that was intimately linked to what he called “imaginary forces,” a notion that he framed as a new critical approach. Its most important functions lie in exposing how mythological narratives naturalize social processes, and in developing a skeptical stance towards the allegedly liberating function of truth. This notion of myth is central in History of Madness, but it features most prominently in a passage that was omitted from the first English translation. Here, Foucault criticizes the narrative that Enlightenment psychiatry told about its own origins, which naturalized social processes. The young Foucault’s notion of myth is strikingly similar to the Marxist notion of second nature.

Female madness in Paulina Chiziane's novels as a strategy of resistance

The following work brings a brief study on how writer Paulina Chiziane turns madness into an observable resistance strategy in almost all of her characters. Here the analysis will be about Maria das Dores, from the novel “The happy song of the partridge” (2010), the crazy woman from the river who dared to invade the exclusive bank of men on the Licungo river and affronted everyone with her nudity. However, the analysis will be transversal between the characters of other novels by Chiziane, such as Rami, by “Niketche: a story of polygamy” (2004); Cláudia, from “The seventh oath” (2005) and Wusheni, from “Apocalypse winds” (1999). The phenomenon of madness will be reflected in the light of Michel Foucault's text, “The history of madness in the classical age” (1978) and the text “The Foucault and Derrida debate: reasons or unreasons of thought” (2017).

The aporetic humanism of early Derrida

This article focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s thought in the 1960s. Though the discourse of the ‘death of man’ was regnant among French avant-garde intellectuals, this article argues that Derrida himself has to be described as a humanist at this stage in his career, even if a reluctant one. The case is made through close textual analysis of three of Derrida’s early and seminal works: ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ (1963), ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1964) and ‘The Ends of Man’ (1968). In these texts, Derrida grapples with issues of the subject and the other. They collectively reveal that the Derrida of the 1960s held fast to the view that philosophical thought could neither dispense with the subject nor escape the horizon of humanism. However, Derrida reconceived the human subject with reference to his core concepts of différance and arche-writing, making for an aporetic humanism that deconstructs the binary of humanism–antihumanism.

The Exclusion’s Legality and Normality in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land

This paper is devoted to dissecting the emerging aspects of exclusion and otherness that characterize Post-Modernity by referring to the specific context of the US culture as presented in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007). What is remarkable about this exclusionary spirit of our times is its increasing legality and normality. The paper deals with exclusion and otherness by building on Michel Foucault’s perceptions introduced in his seminal book History of Madness (1961). Foucault examined the history of exclusion in early modern and modern eras and provided a new understanding of the development of the modern institutions of the Western world. In this paper, we build on Foucault’s position on exclusion and otherness to reveal a wider scope of interpretations that this theory can provide. We argue that Halaby’s novel pinpoints a new generation/manifestation of the exclusionary spirit that Foucault diagnosed. The protagonists of Halaby’s novel are excluded from their social and political context through dynamics that legalize and normalize their exclusion.

Modernism and Close Reading ed. by David James

Reviewed by: Modernism and Close Reading ed. by David James Daniel T. O'Hara (bio) modernism and close reading David James, ed. Oxford University Press https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modernism-and-close-reading-9780198749967?q=modernism%20and%20close%20reading&lang=en&cc=us 272 pages; Cloth $77.00 This collection of eleven essays by distinguished scholar-critics is skillfully edited and helpfully introduced by its editor David James, an expert in the new modernist studies, among several other sub-fields in literary and cultural studies. The question the collection raises is whether or not we know what close reading is, has been, or may be in the future. The volume is divided into two parts, the first of which presents different historical case studies of what close reading has been seen to be and whether and how if needed those perspectives should be revised. The second part presents potential futures for close reading of modernism as close reading combines with other kinds of critical approaches, including queer surrealism, stylistic analysis, feminist sexual ethics, hedonic perspectives on contemporary revisions of modernist [End Page 51] novels, cognitive studies of narrative space, and possible ecologies of critical interpretation. Max Saunders argues that rather than the usual simple picture of Richards and Empson inaugurating and perfecting British Practical Criticism and the New Critical Southern Agrarians perfecting the American close reading practice, we must revise our simple picture and incorporate more decidedly the work of Robert Graves and Laura Riding in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) as well as the work, literary and editorial, of Thomas Hardy and Ford Maddox Ford. This correction of the origin of close reading allows us now to see that the possibilities inherent in it go beyond the perfection of academic exercises as encouraged by the famous and influential 1939 anthology edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry. Rather than a critical mode of complex albeit "organic" encapsulation, close reading can be better seen as an opening up of texts to an array of critical responses that are yet still close readings. Saunders is particularly good when discussing Paul De Man's "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism" in which Empson's seventh type of ambiguity explodes the would-be infinite multiplicity of perspectives supposedly contained by the "organic" form of the text as the perspectives do not simply oppose but contradict one another. This critical slant on close reading gets repeated and enriched throughout the first part of the volume as Peter Howarth plumbs more specifically and comparatively the ground-breaking work of Richards and Empson, Graves and Riding, as reading performances every bit as literary as what they read. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan do the same for the second generation of closer readers, as explication becomes the name for close reading during and after WWII in America and Britain. Joseph Brooker demonstrates how Hugh Kenner's fast-paced flickering aperçus when reading Joyce and Fritz Senn's slow revelations of this author not only argue for close reading as its own literary art-form or performance but also for including the theory-based new schools soon to emerge across the critical world. Finally, the first part of the collection ends with Jean-Michel Rabaté's close reading of Derrida's critical reading of Foucault in the latter's History of Madness, and Foucault's belated response to Derrida, in which not only can Rabaté find Derrida's case against Foucault to be reinforced but more surprisingly, perhaps, there is new evidence for how Derrida misread Freud on the death-drive [End Page 52] in the course of The Postcard. "[Derrida] bypass[es] the fact that the pages he has quoted state a thesis that Freud rejects explicitly. Indeed … he turns around and exclaims: 'It cannot be so.'" In this nuanced manner, "When Did Close Reading Acquire a Bad Name?" is the highlight of the first part of this collection, and concludes with a brilliant critique, careful, astute, discriminating, of Badiou's reading of Beckett. What Rabaté makes visible is what Paul de Man too often just claimed is the blindness and insight structure of critical or revisionary reading that...

Foucault's Strange Eros

Foucault's Strange Eros

Book Review: ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East

Book Review: ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East

Re-placing the lunatic asylum in the history of madness

The history of madness remains one of the most fascinating and contested fields in modern social history. For several decades, scholarship has focussed on analysing the rise of the lunatic asylum and the new profession of psychiatry that was forged within its walls. Individuals diagnosed as insane were largely considered passive victims of social forces beyond their control. However, a new generation of scholarship has sought to de-centre the asylum and reconceptualise the ‘mad’ as historical actors with agency who had troubled lives outside of the formal institution. This article reflects on some major themes in the English-language historiography of madness over the last forty years, at the same time placing some Australian scholarship within that wider context throughout the narrative and in references. It highlights how, paradoxically, histories of the lunatic asylum have provided new insights into extramural care, the persistence of non-medical discourses about insanity, and the subjective experiences of the insane. Rather than ‘out of sight and out of mind’ – an historical topic resting on the periphery of modern social history – this new literature on the history of madness and the asylum illustrates how psychological distress was a mainstream social problem that upended family relations and profoundly disrupted community life.

From the margins: madness and history in Australia

This Introduction situates the Australian scholarship on the histories of mental illness, madness, psychiatry and institutions in a wider perspective. It argues for the relevance and importance of histories of madness in our present.