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Budapest W5: Performing Arts - Psychiatric Power

· Michel Foucault, “Psychiatric Power,” in Paul Rabinow ed., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth(The New Press, 1998).
"A direct action upon illness: not just enable it to reveal its truth to the physician's gaze but to produce that truth." p.39

"The eighteenth-century hospital was supposed to create the conditions that would allow the truth of the sickness to break out. Thus, it was a place of observation and demonstration, but also of purification and testing." p.40

"For the patient, the hospital milieu no longer must be the place that favors a decisive event; it simply enables a reduction, a transfer, an amplification, a verification; the test is transformed i~t~ a proof in the technical structure of the laboratory and in the physician's
report." p.41

"The other therapeutic place put to use was the theater, nature's opposite: the patient's own madness was acted out for him on the stage; it was lent a momentary fictive reality; one pretended, with the help of props and disguises, as if it were true, but in such a way that, caught in this trap, the delusion would finally reveal itself to the very eyes of its victim." p.42

"The great asylum physician-whether it is Luret Charcot, or Kraepelin-is both the one who can tell the truth of the disease through"the knowledge [savoir] he has of it and the one who can produce the disease in its truth and subdue it in its reality, through the power that his will exerts on the patient himself." p.43

"The whole of modern psychiatry is fundamentally pervaded by antipsychiatry, if one understands by this everything that calls back into question the role of the psychiatrist formerly charged with producing the truth of illness in the hospital space." p.45

"The demedicalisation of madness is correlative with that fundamental questioning of power in antipsychiatric practice. A fact that allows us to gauge the latter's opposition to "depsychiatrisation," which appears to characterise psychoanalysis as well as psychopharmacology" p.49




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