Madness and Democracy (ebook)

Argumento de Madness and Democracy (ebook)

How the insane asylum became a laboratory of democracy is revealed in this provocative look at the treatment of the mentally ill in nineteenth-century France. Political thinkers reasoned that if government was to rest in the hands of individuals, then measures should be taken to understand the deepest reaches of the self, including the state of madness. Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain maintain that the asylum originally embodied the revolutionary hope of curing all the insane by saving the glimmer of sanity left in them. Their analysis of why this utopian vision failed ultimately constitutes both a powerful argument for liberalism and a direct challenge to Michel Foucault's indictment of liberal institutions.

The creation of an artificial environment was meant to encourage the mentally ill to live as social beings, in conditions that resembled as much as possible those prevailing in real life. The asylum was therefore the first instance of a modern utopian community in which a scientifically designed environment was supposed to achieve complete control over the minds of a whole category of human beings. Gauchet and Swain argue that the social domination of the inner self, far from being the hidden truth of emancipation, represented the failure of its overly optimistic beginnings.

Madness and Democracy combines rich details of nineteenth-century asylum life with reflections on the crucial role of subjectivity and difference within modernism. Its final achievement is to show that the lessons learned from the failure of the asylum led to the rise of psychoanalysis, an endeavor focused on individual care and on the cooperation between psychiatrist and patient. By linking the rise of liberalism to a chapter in the history of psychiatry, Gauchet and Swain offer a fascinating reassessment of political modernity.

"A fertile interpretation of the history of the idea of insanity and of political efforts to cure the insane. . . . As much philosophy and cultural history, this work deserves a thoughtful audience."--Choice

"[A] new model of the insane . . . prompted the modern understanding of the self. Furthermore, [the authors] contend, the asylum system was structured as an ideal community that crystallized the totalitarian exercise of power in postrevolutionary democratic society. . . . [S]ure to stimulate much theoretical speculation."--Publishers Weekly0Foreword Editor's Note Introduction 3 Abstract I: The Moment of Origin 19 Pt. 1 Advent, Apotheosis, and Failure of the Asylum Establishment Abstract II 23 Ch. I La Salpetriere, or The Double Birth of the Asylum 25 Ch. II The Politics of the Asylum 49 Ch. III Impossible Power 84 Ch. IV A Socializing Machine 100 Abstract III: Crisis, Agony, and Repetition 145 Abstract IV: Esquirol at La Salpetriere 145 Pt. 2 The Passions as a Sketch of a General Theory of Mental Alienation Abstract V: Esqirol in 1805 149 Abstract VI: The Clinical Resolution 149 Abstract VII: Between the Will to Madness and Brain Lesions 149 Abstract VIII: What the Passions Make It Possible to Think (Beginning) 150 Ch. V What the Passions Make It Possible to Think 151 Ch. VI Reducing Insanity: The Mirror of Alterity 163 Abstract IX: Approaches to Healing; How to Speak to the Insane 167 Ch. VII The Society of Individuals and the Institution of Speech 169 Ch. VIII The Conquest of Dissymmetry 194 Ch. IX Openings and Aporia of Moral Treatment 230 Epilogue: Social Divide, Division of the Subject, Mad Rupture 255 Notes 283 List of Works Cited 311 Index 317