Foucault's concept of madness and historical social control

¶ … Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (mentioned on page 5 of 11, "the reading list")

Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is a complex work with so many different themes that it requires strenuous and concentrated reading to understand and retain Foucault's argument. The material then needs a review in order to reflect and critically engage with the reading. This kind of book is no light reading nor can it be done within a few hours. It needs a pen in hand or a luminescent marker to wade through the lines. The reader, too, needs to know that best results demand that he absorb this book in small bites in order to read, reflect, and reread before continuing with other sectors of the book. Foucault, too, can disturb people with his revolutionary insights, but for those who are philosophically attuned and who are post-modernist by inclination and by cognitive tendency, Foucault's book will grab and delight. It is one of these rare books that disturb your previous paradigm of life. It makes you step aside from the tide of the way that you ordinarily perceive life and human interaction due to your socialization. It shakes your socialization and sets patterns of human interaction and control in a new form. In fact, once you have finished reading that book, you may never see life the same. You may even end up an anarchist as so many others who have read this same book have become.

Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization

The best way to summarize Foucault's Madness and Civilization may be to categorize it into its various themes. Foucault follows the progression of societal treatment for madness throughout history and comes to an analytical conclusion about that illness by categorizing the phenomenon of insanity under different terms. These in turn are:

1. Uneasiness of madness (end of Middle Ages)

Madness supplanted social fear of leprosy. All the myths and superstitions of leprosy -- the fear, fantastic images, and apocalyptic visions -- associated themselves with the phenomena of madness. Insane people were, in turn, accused of being witches and thought to be inhabited by holy spirits. They were tortured and worshipped, and it was, generally, thought that the demon controlled them

3. Condemnation of Confinement (the 19th century)

Society saw confinement as an economic as well as a social error and aberration. The insane person had to be separated form other social deviants. The house of confinement therefore transmuted into an asylum which literally meant to 'protect' the individual from the ravages of society. The family of the victim became the protectors or the ones who most frequently placed him in the asylum. The asylum served as a refuge from society. The person became an outcast. More often than not (and particularly if she was a woman -- which seemed to be mostly the case), the victim was painted as morally guilty for relinquishing her social duty. Madness, therefore, at the end of the 19th century became moral degeneracy. And a new relationship between patient and doctor emerged where patient was encouraged to confide in doctor and the doctor became the moral healer. Thus the birth of psychoanalysis.

Art and Madness

Foucault's book ends with the complex relationship between art and madness. He sees the two closely intertwined since both step into the realms of the imaginary and often disturb the world of the pragmatic and real. Says Foucault:

Since the end of the nineteenth century, unreason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning flash of works such as those of Hoederlin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud

These people were obsessed with their work, fervid in the creation and 'hallucination' of new ideas that contradicted and threatened the mesh of human reality. In a great way, therefore, Foucault himself could be called a 'madman' and it may explain the reason that he seems to identify so well with the outcast. The outcast, in his opinion, is anyone who is a deviant to society. These, too, are people who scorn and shrug off convention. And, therefore, extend to artists who create a revolutionary and new way of perceiving and illustrating the world.

Since madness is a component of Art (or the reverse), it is for this reason that the medical approach (including psychoanalysis) is so mismatched to insanity and cannot 'cure' it. Modern medicine and therapy (or psychiatry) fail to listen to the voice of the mad, or to unreason (a popular Foucault term), and tend to lecture at it rather than to stand at its level and engage with it in an unconditional emphatic dialogue.

Returning to Art and to artists such as Nietzsche, Nerval and Artaud, madness may be linked to creativity but also destroys the work of the art. The seed of madness inherent in these works -- the passion and anti-rationality - robs the work of its logic and reason, make sit scintillate in a Nietzsche an frenzy, but, by doing so, takes it out of the realm of the cool, logical and rational realm of scientific 'normality' that the Western (or 'civilized' world) so delights in.

The Construction of Madness.

The social construction of madness is Faucet's all-encompassing point, and the thread onto which the reader should hold if he or she wishes to make any sense of the book.

Madness is not an illness per se, but, rather, a phenomena that is defined by its context (namely socio-historical era), and has, accordingly, undergone many different delineations in its history as the conceptual categorization of insanity (beforehand) showed.

Madness is no permeable, fixed natural illness. In fact, it may not be called an illness altogether. It is rather a label applied to a human who differs / deviates from the social conventions of his era, and each era perceived and treated the insane person in a different way.

A combination of socio-cultural-economic variables determine the particular group's attitude to the deviant individual - and Foucault will explore this idea in another book that is dedicated to the way that society considers and treats another outcast: the offender whom it too locks up, not in an asylum but in a jail.

Madness has gone through many different definitions in history. In the Medieval Age it was both deified and burnt. The Renaissance / Enlightenment gentleman confined it, whilst the Modern gentry treated it. Then it was seen as a moral illness, and today? That's where the question-mark hangs.

At the end of the day, we see how social perception and individual behavior are so closely interconnected. The 'mad' person can be, in turns, 'spiritual', 'bad', wayward, possessed, split, and 'irrational' and so forth. The bottom line is that he steps away from the stream of society and, by so doing, invites revulsion and treatment. Madness, as Foucault sees it, exists within a certain space of society where it has been confined and delimited. The shape of this space, and its effects on the madman, depend on society itself. Taking this thought to its ultimate end, we may question the myth of individuality. 'To be different', to become an individual', 'to step away from the crowd', to not conform' are motifs of American / Western pop psychology. Yet, were any of us seriously to do so, we would each be considered 'mad'. 'Madness, therefore, may symbolize the unique human being; Nietzsche Superman. And this may be the reason why Foucault considered Nietzsche mad. The ideal human-being and madness are so closely linked together that each, polarities on the other end, becomes merged. Foucault's book is heavy reading, but it gives us much too think about and one of the thoughts that I walk away with is the question: it may be better to be mad. After all, I may end up a superior human-being. But the price is immense

Source

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. London: Routledge, 2001.

Part One: Procedural

1) The book I reviewed is a (Check one):Primary Source?

Secondary Source?

2) I confirmed that my book is a primary (secondary) source with the instructor or GTA: Yes?

No?

3) My review is at least four full pages long: Yes?

No?

4) My book choice was:

a) Approved by instructor?

b) On approved reading list?

c) Taken from the "suggested readings" in the textbook?

d) None of the above?

Part Two: Scoring Rubric Question (Read syllabus for full description of each question)

Max Score

Your score

Instructor Score

1: Book Information

5 Philosophical construction of madness

2: Why did you choose this book?

7 it was challenging and described as such by instructor. I like to think / like philosophy

3: Summary of contents and conclusions

35 The social construction of madness is Faucet's all-encompassing point, and the thread onto which the reader should hold if he or she wishes to make any sense of the book.

Madness is not an illness per se, but, rather, a phenomena that is defined by its context (namely socio-historical era), and has, accordingly, undergone many different delineations in its history as the conceptual categorization of insanity (beforehand) showed.

Madness is no permeable, fixed natural illness. In fact, it may not be called an illness altogether. It is rather a label applied to a human who differs / deviates from the social conventions of his era, and each era perceived and treated the insane person in a different way. Madness has gone through many different definitions in history. In the Medieval Age it was both deified and burnt. The Renaissance / Enlightenment gentleman confined it, whilst the Modern gentry treated it. Madness, as Foucault sees it, exists within a certain space of society where it has been confined and delimited. The shape of this space, and its effects on the madman, depend on society itself.

4: If primary, what does it tell you about this period of the past; if secondary, author's qualifications.

10 Modernism where society questioned the accepted conventions of the time.

5 If primary, how does it help you to understand the past; if secondary, what is the author's approach?

10 It helps me to question conventions of the past and see phenomena as not fixed but rather socially constructed.

6: If primary, what is the author's view; if secondary, how convincing is author's approach?

10 That certain segments of society control the more vulnerable ones, often for economic reasons.

7: What kinds of evidence are used by author?

10 Madness in this book (criminals in another). They are not productive and are deviant to 'normality'. They are locked away.

8: How has your understanding of the topic changed as a result of reading this book?

8 I see madness in a different away as social construction rather than (or in juxtaposition to) natural illness

9: How does this book compare to treatment of this topic in the rest of the class or in what you have learned elsewhere?

5 Madness is seen as disease in Medicine / the Natural sciences

Total score