Godelek, Kamuran. "Review of Michel Foucault's PSYCHIATRIC POWER." METAPSYCHOLOGY ONLINE REVIEWS November 27, 2007.

Foucault, Michel. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France, 1973-1974. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Michel Foucault taught seminars at the College de France from January 1971 until his death in June 1984 under the title "The History of Systems of Thought". This edition based on the words delivered in public by Foucault covers the period between November 1973 and February 1974. Even though both his books and courses share certain themes, the lectures arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's philosophical activities. In these lectures he sets out the program for a genealogy of psychiatry, of its characteristic knowledge/power relations. Thus, Psychiatric Power pursues the history started with Madness and Civilization which undertook the archaeology of the division between the insane and the sane in Western society. In order to give an account of this form of psychiatric and medical knowledge about madness, one must start with an analysis of the apparatuses and the techniques of power that organized the treatment of the mad in the period that spans from Philippe Pinel to Jean-Martin Charcot. Psychiatry is not born as a consequence of progress in the knowledge of madness but from the disciplinary apparatuses within which the regime imposed on madness is organized. From this point of view, Psychiatric Power continues the project of a history of human sciences. . . . Read the entire review here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=3943.