Michel Foucault e a persistência do poder psiquiátrico

Abstract

This article aims studying the course held by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France in 1973-1974. The records of this course were published in 2003 under the name "Psychiatric power". The objective was to compare the different ways in which Foucault analyzes the question of madness in "Psychiatric power" and in "History of Madness in the Classical Age" (1961). It is a comparative study about the different ways of analyzing madness developed by Michel Foucault during the archeological and genealogic periods of his work. The absence of the body; binary diagnosis; the description of the surface of symptoms; the classification of diseases more similar to the botanical classification than to pathology; the process of cure directly linked to restitution of behaviors and moral values; as well as the over-power of the psychiatrist, seem to speak about the persistence of an old model of power, a pre-modern and pre-capitalist model, a residue of the old sovereign power.