The birth of psychiatry according to Foucault.

• Grant number: 22/09391-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2023
• End date: December 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Damon Santos Moutinho
• Grantee: Francisco Guitler
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In History of Madness in the age of Reason Michel Foucault traces the origins of psychiatric medicine in Western Europe. The historical facts highlighted by the philosopher are the founding of the General Hospital of Paris and the large-scale internment of the poor. As Foucault argues, the 17th and 18th centuries form the period of pregnancy of the medical-psychiatric science, whose birth date is the beginning of the century with the appearance of modern psychiatric hospitals. A new cut in the social space. Nevertheless, the exclusion of madness in the West was productive. The hospitalization of the insane provided the conditions for the possibility of a new type of rationality for sciences: the mentally ill are an example of the unruly and immoral use of reason. This was the period of the formation of psychiatric power.