Die Macht der Psychiatrie

In The Power of Psychiatry Michel Foucault presents a genealogy of modern psychiatry and the specific forms of knowledge it has produced. According to his thesis, one can only take psychiatry's knowledge of insanity into account if one analyses it on the basis of the dispositives and knowledge techniques that determine the treatment of the sick. Foucault's brilliant study focuses primarily on the early period of psychiatry from Pinel to Charcot, and concludes with a consideration of the "depsychiatrization" of insanity in the neurosciences and psychoanalysis, which has had an impact to the present day through the movement of anti-psychiatry.