Madness and Democracy : : The Modern Psychiatric Universe / / Marcel Gauchet, Gladys Swain.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Gauchet, Marcel,; Swain, Gladys,
• TeilnehmendeR: Porter, Catherine.; Seigel, Jerrold E.
• MitwirkendeR: Seigel, Jerrold,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2012]; ©1999
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Edition: Core Textbook
• Language: English
• Series: New French Thought Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (360 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Editors' Note -- Introduction -- Abstract I: The Moment of Origin -- Part One: Advent, Apotheosis, and Failure of the Asylum Establishment -- Abstract II -- Chapter I. La Salpêtrière, or The Double Birth of the Asylum -- Chapter II. The Politics of the Asylum -- Chapter III.1 Impossible Power -- Chapter IV. A Socializing Machine -- Abstract III: Crisis, Agony, and Repetition -- Abstract IV: Esquirol at La Salpêtrière -- Part Two: The Passions as a Sketch of a General Theory of Mental Alienation -- Abstract V: Esqirol in 1805 -- Abstract VI: The Clinical Resolution -- Abstract VII: Between the Will to Madness and Brain Lesions -- Abstract VIII: What the Passions Make It Possible to Think (Beginning) -- Chapter V. What the Passions Make It Possible to Think -- Chapter VI. Reducing Insanity: The Mirror of Alterity -- Abstract IX: Approaches to Healing; How to Speak to the Insane -- Chapter VII. The Society of Individuals and the Institution of Speech -- Chapter VIII.The Conquest of Dissymmetry -- Chapter IX. Openings and Aporia of Moral Treatment -- Epilogue: Social Divide, Division of the Subject, Mad Rupture -- Notes -- List of Works Cited -- Index