Michel Foucault on Mental Illness, Medicine, and Dominance

One of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault’s work has had a seismic impact in such fields as criminology, cultural studies, history, philosophy, political theory, and psychiatry, as well as sociology. His inter-disciplinary studies of madness, medicine, knowledge, punishment, and sexuality have significantly altered how sociologists now approach these topics. In his early writings Foucault sought to understand how the human and social sciences historically came to be possible. He later saw power as a discursive system of knowledge that shapes institutional practices in particular sites, such as asylums, barracks, factories, prisons, and schools.

Paul-Michel Foucault was raised in a wealthy family in the provincial French city of Poitiers. In order to prepare for the admission tests for the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he relocated to Paris in 1945. He obtained his licence de philosophie in 1948 after studying philosophy there. He started teaching at the University of Lille in 1952, and as a result of this research and teaching experience, a book was published. He was influenced by developments in analysis that expanded concepts in these two main areas: phenomenology and Marxism.

Mental Illness

In his doctoral thesis, Foucault mapped the connection between mental illness and society, which he later denied as a result of structuralism. But it is useful to split his labor into two separate periods, one of which is what he called his “archaeologies,” the other his “genealogies”. The first is influenced by general structuralist obsession with language but also a deeper comprehension of dialogue. The second is heavily influenced by the skeptical view of history held by philosopher Frederick Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. The historical customs that are thought to be strange and bizarre are actually governed by structural codes of knowledge. Foucault argues that what we regard as meaningful truth claims of medicine are also governed by similar arbitrary structures.

Medicine

The book The Birth of the Clinic examines the emergence of medical knowledge around the time of the French Revolution with a much more condensed historical lens. The Renaissance, Classical Age, and Modernity are independent eras, each ruled by what he terms a single ‘episteme’ – the implicit conceptual structure that provides the horizons of thinking in these different epochs. This illustrates both the “exotic charm of another system of thought” and “the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that,” according to Foucault. His goal is to make the present weird rather than the bizarre past.

In it, he argues that historical materialism’s focus on class and its inability to explain certain forms of oppression has led to the emergence of numerous social movements centered around feminism, the environment and minority groups’ civil rights. ‘Historical materialism’ is the term used to describe Karl Marx’s theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborator, Engels, the ultimate cause and moving power of historical events are to be found in the economic development of society and the social and political upheavals wrought by changes to the mode of production. Historical materialism challenges the view that historical processes have come to a close and that capitalism is the end of history (as advanced by writers like Fukuyama.)

Dominance

Foucault was inspired by Cambodia and Eastern Europe to see history as a sequence of dominance-related forms. The pursuit of the absolute is entirely at odds with Nietzsche’s worldview, who’s genealogical approach is now firmly established. More than just a history of punishment, this book is a description of how power works in modern society. Foucault maintains that the book ‘Discipline and Punish‘ is his best accomplishment.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that the Victorian era was not a time when sexuality was suppressed. He argues that this is because other fields, including medicine and psychology, developed their interrogations of sexuality in an earlier stage than we typically associate them with. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains how the “microphysics of power” affects people’s bodies. He argues that power operates in a variety of contexts that cannot all be explained by one, all-inclusive idea. His criticism of ideology is another component of it.

The concept of “decentering the subject” is used to critique humanism, which holds that human awareness should be at the center of social study. Foucault asserted that the subject’s very concept is a social creation created by discourses that place them in power relations field. Foucault’s disregard for the macro-physics of power was a response from Marxist detractors. Foucault established a different kind of power that has become more prominent in modernity. It’s called “bio-power,” and it targets entire communities rather than single people or groups of people.

Theories of Foucault have been attacked for failing to acknowledge the fact that history is not a linear process. His historical mistakes, which John Braithwaite has called “appalling,” continue to be criticized by historians. Many, including Judith Butler, believe his ideas are helpful in questioning gender and sex distinctions.


Major works

• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. 1961. London: Routledge, 2001.
• The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. 1963. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
• The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
• The Archaeology of Knowledge. 1969. London: Routledge, 2000.
  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1975. London: Penguin, 1991.
• The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. 1976. London: Penguin, 1990.
• Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977. Ed. by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
• Society Must Be Defended. 1975–6. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
• ‘Governmentality’. 1978. In Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds.
• The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
• ‘The Subject and Power’. 1982. In Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds.
• Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of the History of Sexuality. 1984. London: Penguin, 1992.
• The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of the History of Sexuality. 1984. London: Penguin, 1990. P. Rabinow, ed. 1984.
• The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin.
  
  

Further reading

• Gordon Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds. 1991.
• The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. 1983.  
• Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Source: Fifty Key Sociologists: The Formative Theorists, John P. Scott