Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974

by Foucault, Michel (2008)

Key Passage

This means that in a system like this we are never dealing with amass, with a group, or even, to tell the truth, with a multiplicity: we areonly ever dealing with individuals. Even il a collective order is giventhrough a megaphone, addressed to everyone at the same time andobeyed by everyone at the same time, the (act remains that this collective order is only ever addressed to individuals and is only ever receivedby individuals placed alongside each other. All collective phenomena,all the phenomena of multiplicities, are thus completely abolished. And,as Bentham says with satisfaction, in schools there will no longer be the"cribbing" that is the beginning of immorality; in workshops there willbe no more collective distraction, songs, or strikes;2* in prisons, no morecollusion;2'1 and in asylums for the mentally ill, no more of thosephenomena of collective irritation and imitation, etcetera. (p.75)

Keywords

Foucault, Postmodernism, Psychiatric Power, Power, Resistance, Labour, Wages, Medicine, Clinic, Psychiatrization

Themes

Psychiatric Power, Foucault Citations

Citation

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