Jan. 18. Psychiatric Power (1-171)

[Fig 1.] THE INHERENT BEAUTY IN A FAILED ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT, Jonathan Schipper, (http://www.oppositionart.com)

Psychiatric Power: The Doubleness of Power of Psychiatric Treatment Doctoring the Madness.

‘The madness overcomes the patient.’

Michel Foucault analyzed the treatment of madness. He defined the treatment doctoring the madness as psychiatric power. What he wants to speak, what is said through the analysis of psychiatric power/knowledge is the symptom of madness, the madness itself.

In the lecture of 19 December 1973, Foucault emphasizes that the madness is a new illness overcoming the patient. It customizes the psychiatric power performed by disciplinary apparatuses as a sort of tactics and strategies to break down the pleasure of madness traversing between the real and reality. It means that insofar as the knowledge of madness can not catch the madness, the madness remains in the pleasure.

The psychiatric power conceals the omnipotence that madness is beyond the psychiatric power, and reversely, the concealment reveals a truth that the pleasure of madness ensures our life.

The truth of psychiatric power involves with both aspects of concealing and revealing. It can be called as the doubleness of power of psychiatric treatment doctoring the madness.

In 1840, the psychiatrist, F. Leuret noticed “the unfortunate sign” of essence of madness, and noted that “a new illness was overcoming the patient.”[1] This analysis notices that the madness is the pleasure, and the pleasure is superior to the psychiatric power/knowledge system depending on disciplinary apparatuses.

In order to avoid the omnipotence of madness, the pleasure of illness overcoming the patient, human developed the constitution of psychiatric knowledge. The psychiatric power is a flow, network. It is “a question of a sort of great single body” organized by disciplinary apparatuses as a sort of tactical procedures and strategic elements.[2]

The essential function of psychiatric power is an effective agent of reality, a sort of intensifier of reality to madness. It is to impose and intensify the reality. It means that the psychiatric power is the supplement of power added to reality, and its aim is to reproduce the reality within the reality.

As the real form of reality itself and simultaneously the surplus power of reality, the psychiatric power prohibits the taking the pleasure of madness, and the other side, it accelerates the pleasure of madness originated from the essential lack of being.[3]

The doubleness of psychiatric power takes place in the form of charging discourse. It has a performative character in the game of the cure, since the patient must not perceives, but identify his biographical reality if he wants to be cured. It presents that the psychiatric power is a sort of action of confession, and thus it has to be addressed in the analyzing of symptom.

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[1] Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 19 December 1973, p. 164.

[2] M. Foucault, Ibid, p. 164.

[3] The word, lack is used in the concept of Lacanian, not Sartrian.