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Budapest W5: Performing Arts - Class Notes

Technology of power and madness - psychiatry in the West mid-late 20th Century

18-19th century
- Asylum as a space for treatment (nature and theatre)
- Asylum as a space of other (alongside other institutions such as orphanage), social management of disorder such as crime and poverty
- As such, it also becomes an exemplary space of technologies of discipline

20th Century
- Mental (psychiatric) Hospitals: the psychiatry as a proper medicine, resolution for the illness of mind; "moral" threats caused by industrialisation (gender, class (not working, being lazy) and race)
- Anti-psychiatry movements
- De-instutionalisation and community-based care system

Anti-psychiatry
- In the mid-20th century
- The term coined by David Cooper, S.African psychiatrist
- Challenges the medicalisation of madness; the medical-government control over people with mental illness; the damaging impact of the treatments (lobotomy, ECT, heavy medication), epistemological ungroundedness; social/political labelling of the rebels and deviant minds.
- Fuelled psychiatry survivors movement (alongside other civil rights and left movements in the 1960-70s)

Psychiatry - has total power over the patient - forced institutionalisation, heavy medication etc. In the efforts to treat, are they performatively reproducing symptoms

Depsychiatry - works within the system to put the power with the person who is considered the patient (treatment of symptoms that manifest - diagnosis and therapy. Psychoanalysis - treating the root cause - why are the symptoms manifesting, it is contained and controlled within the medical production of knowledge). Power is with the patient through payment.

Antipsychiatry - targets the institution itself  "Rather than a withdrawal outside the asylum space, it is a question of its sys­tematic destruction through an internal effort" p.47 (Foucault). Face the madness - not through the lens of normativity (dominance of sanity over madness is questioned)

Foucault - How do you produce knowledge about mental illness in the vessel of  power/truth/knowledge?

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'The Other Side of the Underneath' (1972, dir, Jane Arden)
- The portrayals of the mental status of the women
- Feminist, and gendered response to anti-psychiatry movement
- The affective dimension of the film

Gypsy scene - what is real and what is not using schizophrenia as a tool
Sexuality/Visibility/Madness/Violence intermingled with Christian symbolism (Christian resurrection into in/sanity)

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 For proposal
Theme - productivity induced stress
Method - sensory play workshop
Theory -
Why do I want to do it? (Political/Ethical/Social reasons/constraints)
Challenges I might have

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