The History of Reason in the Age of Madness revolves around three axes: the Foucauldian critical-historical method, its relationship with enlightenment critique, and the way this critique is implemented in Foucault's seminal work, History of Madness. Foucault's exploration of the origins of psychiatry applies his own theories of power, truth and reason and draws on Kant's philosophy, shedding new light on the way we perceive the birth and development of psychiatric practice. Following Foucault's adoption of 'limit attitude', which investigates the (...) limits of our thinking as points of disruption and renewal of established frames of reference, this book dispels the widely accepted belief that psychiatry represents the triumph of rationalism by somehow conquering madness and turning it into an object of neutral, scientific perception. It examines the birth of psychiatry in its full complexity: in the late eighteenth century, doctors were not simply rationalists but also alienists, philosophers of finitude who recognized madness as an experience at the limits of reason, introducing a discourse which conditioned the formation of psychiatry as a type of medical activity. Since that event, the same type of recognition, the same anthropological confrontation with madness has persisted beneath the calm development of psychiatric rationality, undermining the supposed linearity, absolute authority and steady progress of psychiatric positivism. Iliopoulos argues that Foucault's critique foregrounds this anthropological problematic as indispensable for psychiatry, encouraging psychiatrists to become aware of the epistemological limitations of their practice, and also to review the ethical and political issues which madness introduces into the apparent neutrality of current psychiatric discourse. (shrink)

Underlying Foucault’s accounts of asylums, hospitals, prisons, and schools was a continuing concern with power and knowledge. In the field of mental health, his preoccupation with power relations and the construction of narratives of exclusion and repression in the History of Madnesshave led many scholars to consider Foucault an anti-psychiatrist. They question the book’s historical data, which prioritize power relations and political analysis over the actual experience of doctors and patients, undermining its scientific worth. Even thinkers sympathetic to Foucault’s ideas (...) argue that, despite the cultural discontinuities that he sought to foreground in his historical analysis, he nevertheless offered a continuous narrative of confinement and exclusion as a result of the oppressive powers of reason. But for Foucault, power is not unilateral, dominant, and oppressive, but distributional. Power is not a substance or a property one can claim to possess. It is not a political structure, a government or a dominant social class. Power is mobile, unstable, and reversible and is not blind but is determined by an internal logic. There is a form of rationality behind the exercise of power, and when that form of rationality is undermined, power loses its foundations. This can be observed in current forms of psychiatric practice, where psychiatric power is in fact being undermined while apparently being ever more closely inscribed in social practices. (shrink)