Abnormal : lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975 / Michel Foucault ; edited by Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni ; general editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana ; English series editor, Arnold I. Davidson ; translated by Graham Burchell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Marchetti, Valerio, 1939-

Salomoni, Antonella.

Davidson, Arnold I. (Arnold Ira), 1955-

Standardized Title:

Anormaux. English

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Abnormalities, Human--Social aspects--History.

Abnormalities, Human.

Philosophical anthropology--History.

Philosophical anthropology.

History.

Power (Social sciences)--History.

Power (Social sciences).

Abnormalities, Human--Social aspects.

Genre:

History.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xxvi, 374 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First Picador paperback edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Picador, 2004.

Summary:

"Among the Towering Intellectual Figures of the Last Half Century, perhaps the most versatile is Michel Foucault, who wrote classic texts on sexuality, madness, prison, and medicine. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. Attended by thousands, these were seminal events in the world of French letters, and his ideas there expressed remain benchmarks of contemporary critical inquiry. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense developed in "Society Must Be Defended," the first volume of this series, Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth century, linking deformity, delinquency, and sexual deviancy. The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's work and offer a unique window into his thinking. Book jacket."--Jacket.

Contents:

Expert psychiatric opinion in penal cases

What kind of discourse is the discourse of expert psychiatric opinion?

Discourses of truth and discourses that make one laugh

Legal proof in eighteenth-century criminal law

The reformers

The principle of profound conviction

Extenuating circumstances

The relationship between truth and justice

The grotesque in the mechanism of power

The psychological-moral double of the offense

Expert opinion shows how the individual already resembles his crime before he has committed it

The emergence of the power of normalization

Madness and crime

Perversity and puerility

The dangerous individual

The psychiatric expert can only have the character of Ubu

The epistemological level of psychiatry and its regression in expert medico-legal opinion

End of the antagonistic relationship between medical power and judicial power

Expert opinion and abnormal individuals (les anormaux)

Criticism of the notion of repression

Exclusion of lepers and inclusion of plague victims

Invention of positive technologies of power

The normal and the pathological

Three figures that constitute the domain of abnormality: the human monster, the individual to be corrected, the masturbating child

The sexual monster brings together the monstrous individual and the sexual deviant

Historical review of the three figures

Reversal of their historical importance

Sacred embryology and the juridico-biological theory of the monster

Siamese twins

Hermaphrodites: minor cases

The Marie Lemarcis case

The Anne Grandjean case

The moral monster

Crime in classical law

The spectacle of public torture and execution (la supplice)

Transformation of the mechanisms of power

Disappearance of the ritual expenditure of punitive power

The pathological nature of criminality

The political monster: Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette

The monster in Jacobin literature (the tyrant) and anti-Jacobin literature (the rebellious people)

Incest and cannibalism

5 5 February 1975 109

In the land of the orges

Transition from the monster to the abnormal (l'anormal)

The three great founding monsters of criminal psychiatry

Medical power and judicial power with regard to the notion of the absence of interest

The institutionalization of psychiatry as a specialized branch of public hygiene and a particular domain of social protection

Codification of madness as social danger

The motiveless crime (crime sans raison) and the tests of the enthronement of psychiatry

The Henriette Cornier case

The discovery of the instincts

Instinct as grid of intelligibility of motiveless crime and of crime that cannot be punished

Extension of psychiatric knowledge and power on the basis of the problematization of instinct

The 1838 law and the role claimed by psychiatry in public security

Psychiatry and administrative regulation, the demand for psychiatry by the family, and the constitution of a psychiatric-political discrimination between individuals

The voluntary-involuntary axis, the instinctive and the automatic

The explosion of the symptomatological field

Psychiatry becomes science and technique of abnormal individuals

The abnormal: a huge domain of intervention

The problem of sexuality runs through the field of abnormality

The old Christian rituals of confession

From the confession according to a tariff to the sacrament of penance

Development of the pastoral

Louis Habert's Pratique du sacrament de penitence and Charles Borromee's (Carlo Borromeo) Instructions aux confesseurs

From the confession to spiritual direction

The double discursive filter of life in the confession

Confession after the Council of Trent

The sixth commandment: models of questioning according to Pierre Milhard and Louis Habert

Appearance of the body of pleasure and desire in penitential and spiritual practices

A new procedure of examination: the body discredited as flesh and the body blamed through the flesh

Spiritual direction, the development of Catholic mysticism, and the phenomenon of possession

Distinction between possession and witchcraft

The possessions of Loudon

Convulsion as the plastic and visible form of the struggle in the body of the possessed

The problem of the possessed and their convulsions does not belong to the history of illness

The anti-convulsives: stylistic modulation of the confession and spiritual direction; appeal to medicine; recourse to disciplinary and educational systems of the seventeenth century

Convulsion as neurological model of mental illness

9 5 March 1975 231

The problem of masturbation between the Christian discourse of the flesh and sexual psychopathology

Three forms of the somatization of masturbation

The pathological responsibility of childhood

Prepubescent masturbation and adult seduction; the offense comes from outside

A new organization of family space and control: the elimination of intermediaries and the direct application of the parent's body to the child's body

Cultural involution of the family

The medicalization of the new family and the child's confession to the doctor, heir to the Christian techniques of the confession

The medical persecution of childhood by means of the restraint of masturbation

The constitution of the cellular family that takes responsibility for the body and life of the child

Natural education and State education

What makes the psychoanalytic theory of incest acceptable to the bourgeois family (danger comes from the child's desire)

Normalization of the urban proletariat and the optimal distribution of the working-class family (danger comes from fathers and brothers)

Two theories of incest

The antecedents of the abnormal: psychiatric-judicial mesh and psychiatric-familial mesh

The problematic of sexuality and the analysis of its irregularities

The twin theory of instinct and sexuality as epistemologico-political task of psychiatry

The origins of sexual psychopathology (Heinrich Kaan)

Etiology of madness on the basis of the history of the sexual instinct and imagination

The case of the soldier Bertrand

A mixed figure: the monster, the masturbator, and the individual who cannot be integrated within the normative system of education

The Charles Jouy case and a family plugged into the new system of control and power

Childhood as the historical condition of the generalization of psychiatric knowledge and power

Psychiatrization of infantilism and constitution of a science of normal and abnormal conduct

The major theoretical constructions of psychiatry in the second half of the nineteenth century

Psychiatry and racism: psychiatry and social defense.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 352-356) and indexes.

ISBN:

0312424051

9780312424053

OCLC:

60847817