From Abnormal:
Childhood as the Historical Condition of the Generalization of Psychiatric Knowledge and Power (pp. 303-304)
Childhood is an essential element to the way psychiatry functions. It is through childhood that psychiatry establishes a domain over the normalization of adult behavior. Foucault says the discovery of childhood by psychiatry occurred very early on, and that psychiatry is generalized through its interrogation of childhood. Childhood and infantilism thus becomes the filter for analyzing behavior.
Psychiatrization of Infantilism and Constitution of a Science of Normal And Abnormal Conduct (pp. 305-310)
With the addition of this filter, it is no longer necessary to insert abnormality within the context of an illness. Illness begins to occur as a secondary to the condition of abnormality. And conditions can be used to analyze any type of conduct through a psychiatric or scientific lens. the idea of a condition (rather than an illness) can link disparate states of symptoms of madness together, and create problems where none before existed. Depathologization of the object occurs, but psychiatry re-establishes itself as a science through the construction of some major theoretical edifices.
The Major Theoretical Constructions of Psychiatry in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century (pp. 310-315) The first involves organizing and describing a series of deviant behaviors in a sense, creating a taxonomy of abnormality.
The second is a reevaluation of delirium. Delirium is re-established as a mainstay of psychiatry through the “adaptation of delirium to the analysis of the interplay between instinct and pleasure”
The third is the creation of the notion of a condition to replace the notion of illness. “anything that is pathological in the body or deviant in behavior may be a product of a condition”
This notion of the condition gives rise to the need to discover it’s origins, and through this, an interest in heredity. The theory of psychiatric heredity states that any type of condition can give rise to the same or a different type in future generations. This allows psychiatry to establish a “technology of the healthy or unhealthy, useful or dangerous, profitable or harmful” Finally this leads to an identification of those who are degenerate.
Psychiatry and Racism: Psychiatry and Social Defense (pp. 316-318)
As soon as psychiatry becomes responsible for identifying the dangerous and the degenerate, it also assumes responsibility for the protection of communities. This creates what Foucault terms a type of “racism” where individuals as carriers of a condition are stigmatized. “The degenerate is someone who is a danger. The degenerate is someone who cannot be reached by any kind of penalty. The degenerate is someone who at all events, cannot be cured. These three questions with no medical, pathological, or juridical meaning have a very precise meaning in the medicine of the abnormal.”
TheoryPlay: Michel Foucault Abnormal Book Summary
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