Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France (Spring 2011)

STS 6534: Reading Foucault: Lectures at the Collège de France
Spring Semester 2011


*Feb. 8 Abnormal, 167-321, Hyunkyoung Cho


[Fig 1] “Tool’s Life,” Interactive Artwork constituted by the collaborative action of technology and human

The Abnormal Condition of The Abnormal: The Problematic of Generalization of Psychiatry

The problematization of childhood as the condition of abnormality (as the object of psychiatry) The condition of psychiatrization as the mode of production of psychiatric knowledge-power.

1. The condition of the abnormal

The object of psychiatry is the abnormal individual and the domain of abnormalities.
In the regime of psychiatry, the abnormal involves the mixed figure of three characters; the monster, the masturbator, and the individual who have to be corrected.
It depends on the historical condition as the mode of psychiatrization; the mode of (re) production of psychiatric power; the way in which the mixed figure of the abnormal individual is psychiatrized.

The condition is the abnormal basis upon which illnesses become possible. It means that the condition of the abnormal is not the progress (or background) but the fixed (focalized) point. It is no less than the illness (its absolute, its brand, and its name), insomuch as it is a permanent stigma (the discrimination) that brands the individual structurally.

The condition of the abnormal is not the virtuality but the real. There is the difference between the notion of condition and the old traditional notion of predisposition. The predisposition notes “first of all a simple virtuality that did not mean that the individual was not normal”; it was possible to be normal and predisposed to an illness. Second, the predisposition indicates that someone is predisposed to a particular type of illness and not another.

2. The abnormal condition; abnormality of condition

What is stake in the notion of condition is that it is not found in normal individuals. In other words, the individual who suffers from the condition, who has the condition, is not a normal individual. It implies that the condition has an absolute, total etiological value; it can produce absolutely anything, at any time, and in any order; moreover, both physical illness and psychological illnesses can be linked with a condition.
In this sense, we can day that the absolute of condition, the formidable capacity (panoply) of notion of condition reveal the abnormality of condition itself.

Since the condition can be broadly defined by a general disturbance in the play of excitations and inhibitions, by the discontinuous and unpredictable release of what should be inhabited, integrated and controlled, by the absence of a dynamic unity. The notion of condition’s formidable capacity makes and allows “the body behind the abnormal body.” “The background-body” produces a condition that definitely marks the whole of an individual’s body.

3. The childhood as the historical condition of the abnormal

The childhood is a historical stage of development and a general form of behavior becomes the principal instrument of psychiatrization: the childhood has been the principle of the generalization of psychiatry; by taking childhood as the target of psychiatrization, the psychiatry succeeds in being generalized.

It means that the childhood or infantilism becomes one of the historical conditions, a target of the generalization of psychiatric knowledge and power. Insofar as it becomes the filter for analyzing behavior, it is no longer necessary to insert it within an illness, to situate it within a coherent and recognized symptomatology.

4. The problematic of generalization of childhood as condition of the abnormal
The effect of generalization that the problematization of childhood introduces into the psychiatric field (the way in which the problematization of childhood makes possible the generalization of psychiatry).

1) Reproduction (mirror/correlation not imitation)
-Insomuch as it is capable of fixing, blocking, and halting adult conduct and of being reproduced within it, all of the child’s conduct is in principle subject to psychiatric inspection. Conversely, all adult conduct can be psychiatrized insomuch as it can be linked to the child’s conduct in one way or another, whether through resemblance, analogy, or a causal relationship. Consequently, all of the child’s conduct is thoroughly scoured since it may contain an adult fixation within it. Conversely, adult conduct is scrutinized for any possible trace of infantilism.

2) Integration
-(Classical) The psychiatry’s failure to find a way of hitching together pleasure and instinct; It accepted the presence of desire in delirium. However, instinct must be free from pleasure if it is to function as a pathological mechanism because instinct ceases to be automatic if there is pleasure. An individual will necessarily recognize as instinct that is accompanied by pleasure and will register it as liable to induce a pleasure. Therefore, because an instinct accompanied by pleasure naturally figures in a calculation, it cannot be regarded as pathological no matter how violent its movement. Pathologization through instinct excludes pleasure.

-Integrating three elements or three characters; pleasure and its economy, instinct and its mechanism, imbecility (backwardness/retardation)/ the little masturbator, the great monster, and then the individual who rejects all disciplines; Henceforth, instinct may well be a pathological element as well as bringing pleasure; The sexual instinct is pathologized at the level of their appearance without the disconnection between pleasure and instinct that instinctual monomania required. It is enough to show that the process, the mechanism of instinct, and the pleasures that it gives, belongs to an infantile level and are marked by infantilism. Pleasure-instinct-backwardness, pleasure-instinct-retardation now constitutes a unified configuration in which these three characters are brought together.

3) Connection (with neurology, general biology)
-When the major and privileged form of individuals who can be psychiatrized is defined by childhood, psychiatry is able to connect with neurology, on the one hand, and general biology on the other. Psychiatry can function as scientific knowledge and as medical knowledge.

4) Unbalance of condition (the system of reference of psychiatry); authority for the analysis of conduct
-The generalization of psychiatry (the childhood and infantilism of conduct) offers a certain unbalanced condition, that it to say, a condition whose elements do not function pathologically and that is not the basis of disease, but a condition that is nonetheless not normal. The system of reference of psychiatry, or at least the domain of objects that it tries to divide up and control, now comprises the emergence of an instinct that is not ill in itself, that is healthy in itself, but which it is abnormal to see appearing here and now, so early or so late and with so little control; the appearance of a type of conduct that is not pathological in itself but that should not normally appear within the constellation in which it figures. It is a hitch or a scramble in the structures that contrasts with normal development and constitutes the general object of psychiatry. Illness appears only secondarily, as a sort of epiphenomenona, with regard to this condition that is fundamentally a condition of abnormality. Therefore, the psychiatry becomes the science of normal and abnormal behavior by becoming a science of behavioral and structural infantimism. The upside down of image, the unbalance of condition can be called as an inversion produced by effect of generalization of psychiatry.