Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973--1974 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 3)

Michel Foucault says in this volume that if he were write History of Madness or Madness and Civilization again, depending on your English translation, with the passage of time, and because his own focus had changed, it would be a much different book. I think this book of lectures, perhaps owing to its brevity, and because of the verbosity of the other, the better book. It is much easier to follow anyway, in that, rather than describing changes as they happen in time, his discussion involves making a few main points regarding those changes. He sees a similarity between the behavior of mad King George and that of Mary Barnes that he thinks eluded Joe Barnes, Mary's psychiatrist. Let that much of a comment be enough. I don't want it to be spoiler for anyone interested perusing in these lectures. I considered them well worth reading. (Duh! I gave them five stars.) I think for some of the followers of Foucault's thought the lectures in this volume, in one way or another, could be as enlightening as they were for me.

This late addition to the Foucault corpus is a further installment in the College de France courses which have surfaced in the enduring craze for all things Foucault. This volume is no disappointment, as it carries within its pages that wit and offbeat genius that we enjoyed in his earlier work on madness, prisons, and the constitution of reality. Anyone who enjoys working out their gray matter or who was fascinated by the better lecturers in college will find this delightful and thought-provoking.

Read Foucault!!! great book

Psychiatric Power is a fascinating work and might as well be the The History of Madness the sequel. And so like the punitive society I'm left rather depressed. What is more mind boggling is that Foucualt is having descriptions about the disciplinary society in this work, but what isn't considered is the advent of technology and the internet. Well because Foucault dies in 1984, like some sort of twisted joke.His work as a whole leaves me at a complete loss to describe it. For an interested reader, it would probably take at least 3-4 reads at the very least to make sense of it or his lectures. But in a way this is where the threshold of the punitive society begins to go into high gear and it begins to show why Foucault is so well respected. His lectures do a good job of illustrating his research from 1971-1984 or so and with that one can read his lectures, which sadly are being published around now.Foucault has analyzed many things, which is why most ad hominem attacks against him have either never bothered to read him or looked at the fact that he has read thousands of thousands of books from the archives. Something despite ego and all put aside he seems to have shown in some pictures of himself. He was even aware that he wasn't right on everything and simply used his own works to transform himself.Through the work I sense that Foucault really wanted to have a conversation about his research to spark a discussion and in the end this was never realized. But what becomes more disturbing is that we are continuously going in the wrong direction with technology all one has to realize is that Foucault's conclusion is approximately 50 or so years ago and we've had 50 more years to make it even worse. It's one of the more depressing things about his work and the fact that there is no wider civil discourse is one of the many embarrassments of the human species. Foucault is completely uncompromising in his analysis of power

This collection of lectures delivered at the College de France from 1973-1974 is a remarkable update of Foucault's thinking on psychiatry and its constitutive transformations. There is a substantial revision of the early work in `History of Madness,' which Foucault now feels was a history of representations. At this later stage, the vantage point of his analysis has shifted, and he is no longer interested in representations or institutional analyses, but rather with the morphology of power relations that compose apparatuses of knowledge. This series traces, albeit in a preliminary fashion, the precise transformations from psychiatric power in the early 19th century all the way up to the development of psychoanalysis. There is much that is left wide open for further research here, and Foucault's conclusions remain preliminary gestures towards his larger archaeology of knowledge.