Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College De France, 1973-1974

New in paperback. In this new addition to the "College de France Lecture" series, Michel Foucault's historical enquiry into the uses and techniques of power and knowledge finds itself directed towards a study of the birth of psychiatry. "Psychiatric Power" shows not only how Western society's division of the 'mad' from the 'sane' began but also how the apparatuses of society, the institutions of medicine and law, and their treatment of the 'mad' developed into what we now recognize as modern psychiatry and, more widely, modern social and political attitudes towards madness. A seminal new work by this leading thinker of the modern age, "Psychiatric Power" builds on Foucault's published writings whilst opening new vistas within historical and philosophical study.