Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France 1973-1974 [Hardcover]

Michel Foucault (Author), Arnold I. I. Davidson (Author), Graham Burchell (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Michel Foucault:
"[Foucault] must be reckoned with by humanists, social scientists, and political activists."--The New York Times Book Review
"Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are...[His work carries] out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture."--The Nation

About the Author

Michael Foucault is acknowledged as the preeminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s.

Series editor Arnold I. Davidson teaches philosophy, divinity, comparative literature, and history of science at the University of Chicago, and is executive director of the journal Critical Inquiry. He is co-editor of the anthology Michel Foucault: Philosophie.

Translator Graham Burchell has written essays on Michel Foucault and was an editor of The Foucault Effect.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 408 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1 edition (May 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 228601194X
• ISBN-13: 978-2286011949
• ASIN: 1403969221
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #520,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

One of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century and the most prominent thinker in post-war France, Foucault's work influenced disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, philosophy, sociology and literary criticism.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary, August 4, 2010

By 

Mr. Steiner (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973--1974 (Lectures at the College de France) (Paperback)

This collection of lectures delivered at the College de France from 1973-1974 is a remarkable update of Foucault's thinking on psychiatry and its constitutive transformations. There is a substantial revision of the early work in `History of Madness,' which Foucault now feels was a history of representations. At this later stage, the vantage point of his analysis has shifted, and he is no longer interested in representations or institutional analyses, but rather with the morphology of power relations that compose apparatuses of knowledge. This series traces, albeit in a preliminary fashion, the precise transformations from psychiatric power in the early 19th century all the way up to the development of psychoanalysis. There is much that is left wide open for further research here, and Foucault's conclusions remain preliminary gestures towards his larger archaeology of knowledge.

5 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Foucault-Shmoucault, October 11, 2007

By 

David P. Keys (Las Cruces, New Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France 1973-1974 (Hardcover)

This late addition to the Foucault corpus is a further installment in the College de France courses which have surfaced in the enduring craze for all things Foucault. This volume is no disappointment, as it carries within its pages that wit and offbeat genius that we enjoyed in his earlier work on madness, prisons, and the constitution of reality. Anyone who enjoys working out their gray matter or who was fascinated by the better lecturers in college will find this delightful and thought-provoking.