The History of Madness

Foucault's earliest research interests and publications focused on the institutionalisation of medicine, particularly psychiatry in the nineteenth century, in tandem with a fascination with the transgressive potential of madness as an artistic and political force. As I suggested in Chapter 1, Foucault's opus is characterised by a tension between an interest in experience and subjectivity on the one hand, and a devastating critique of these concepts on the other. It is in his early work on madness that the concern with experience – a methodology haunted by something resembling phenomenology – is most visible.

Foucault wished to write a revisionist history of mental illness that would upend the commonplace received view regarding the liberalisation of the treatment of the mad with the birth of modern psychiatry. His investment in this topic and the perspectives from which he approaches it are ambiguous and, potentially, contradictory. Having read philosophy at university, Foucault's interest then turned to the discipline of psychology, and in 1952 he was awarded a diploma in psychopathology after studying under Jean Delay at the Institut de Psychologie. From there, he would go on to gain clinical experience working at the Parisian mental asylum of Saint-Anne, though he did not return to university to complete the training that would have allowed him to practise psychiatry.