The birth of psychiatry in the 19th century

Abstract

The emergence of psychology, psychiatry or psychopathology responds to a function other than healing, assistance, or knowledge of mental illness. Such disciplines configure, generate, and promote a subjectivity that is traversed by normality. They reproduce an exclusionary normativity whose purpose is to maintain control over the social sphere and over individuals at the microphysical level. Analysing our relationship with madness, we can observe how the birth of medical discourses related to the psyche does not respond to an evolution of knowledge that would lead to the unveiling of the true nature of madness or the abandonment of its mystical character. Their emergence responds to a series of historical conditions that determine the discourse and experience of each historical formation.