Abstract

In this new addition to the Collège de France lecture series, Michel Foucault's historical enquiry into the uses and techniques of power and knowledge finds itself directed towards a study of the birth of psychiatry. Psychiatric Power shows not only how Western society's division of the "mad" from the "sane" began, but also how society, medicine, and law and their treatment of the "mad" developed into what we now recognize as modern psychiatry, and how modern social and political attitudes towards madness developed. A seminal work by this leading thinker of the modern age, Psychiatric Power builds on Foucault's published writings while opening new vistas within historical and philosophical study.