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In Reply to: Foucault and The Asylum/Scholars & Cult leaders posted by locke on October 08, 2005 at 20:08:20:
Have you actually read Foucault's The Asylum or Madness & Civiliation? I don't consider Foucault an intellectual lightweight. I also don't think he's the second coming of Sir Isaac Newton. Foucault offers a useful historical critique of social responses to mental illness. That it. I don't see Foucault's main contribution as the particular conclusions he reached, but the application & development of critical theory.
It is often helpful to analyze the uses of power, mechanisms of social control, the construction of social problems, and the uses of discourse structures. Critical theory provides the tools to do this analysis in a methodical, rational manner. Foucault expanded application of this theory base.
The historic institutionalization and subsequent de-institutionalization of people with brain diseases is an enormously complex topic. I don't give Foucault nearly as much credit as Dalymple does with regarding the influence of Madness & Civilization on the de-institutionalization movement. Years before Foucault published Madness & Civiliation, there were books like Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1913). Kesey's extremely influential One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1963) came out about the same time as Madness & Civiliation, but there's no evidence the two works influenced each other.
The harshest critics of psychiatry that I know personally are recovering people with serious and persistent mental illnesses who have spent the better part of their adult lives dealing with the system. Dalrymple makes some important points in his essay, but he's extremely paternalistic.
Unlike Dalrymple, I do not subscribe to the politics of character assassination. Whether or not Foucault was a flaming BD/SM queer who died of AIDS is irrelevant to a discussion of Madness & Civilization. It might be more relevant to a discussion Foucault's History of Sexuality, but then, shouldn't we also ask whether Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel is simply an expression of a deviant lifestyle?
