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B. Two questions then arise [when we acknowledge
a positive and real schema of mental illness (status, function)
a negative and virtual schema of mental illness (exclusion, potentialities)
a schema of expression and recognition (of society, of the individual)]:
1. how did our culture come to give
sickness the meaning of deviation?
the patient a status that excludes them?
2. how, despite this, does our society express itself in these morbid forms in which it refuses to recognize itself?
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. Illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
[d. Contrary to Benedict and Durkheim's negative and virtual analyses, there are diseases which have function in a culture - cont'd]
v. [Under such a positivist-expressivist schema,]
– The analyses of our psychologists and our sociologists, who
make the patient a deviant
seek the origin of the morbid in the abnormal
are therefore above all a projection of cultural themes.
– In reality [i.e., at the level of concrete reality], a society expresses itself positively [i.e., defined in terms of what it is, rather than by what it is not] in the mental illnesses manifested by its members; and this, whatever the status it gives to these morbid forms:
whether it places them at the center of its religious life as is often the case with primitive peoples
whether it seeks to expatriate them by situating them outside of social life, as our culture does
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. Illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
[d. Contrary to Benedict and Durkheim's negative and virtual analyses, there are diseases which have function in a culture - cont'd]
iv. If Durkheim and the American psychologists have made deviation the very nature of the disease, it is no doubt due to a cultural illusion which is common to them:
our society does not want to recognize itself in this patient that it hunts or imprisons
at the very moment when it diagnoses the disease, it excludes the patient.
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. Illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
[d. Contrary to Benedict and Durkheim's negative and virtual analyses, there are diseases which have function in a culture - cont'd]
iii. [As another counterexample to a purely negative and virtual analysis,] here is, according to Callaway, how one becomes a shaman, among the Zulus:
"at the beginning", one who is in the process of becoming a shaman “is robust in appearance, but with time it becomes more and more delicate…;
he … never stops complaining about being in pain…
he dreams of all kinds of things and his body is muddy…
he has convulsions which stop for a time when he has been sprinkled with water
he sheds tears at the first lack of respect, then he cries loudly
A man about to become a diviner is a great cause of trouble”.
Therefore,
—it would be wrong to say that the characteristic behaviors of the shaman are
[on one hand,] recognized and validated virtualities among the Zulus
[but, on the other and,] qualified on the contrary as hypochondria, or hysteria among Europeans
—[because,]
not only is the awareness of illness not exclusionary
[but, in fact, the awareness of illness is inclusive] of the social role, but still [nonetheless] it names it
—[thus,] the disease, recognized as such, is conferred a status by the group that denounces it. We would also find other examples in the role played, in our societies, by
the village idiot
the epileptics
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. Illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
[d. Contrary to Benedict and Durkheim's negative and virtual analyses, there are diseases which have function in a culture - cont'd]
ii. [As counterexample to a purely negative and virtual analysis,] let's leave the case famous of the Berdaches, among the Dakotas of North America; these homosexuals have
a religious status of priests and magicians
an economic role of craftsmen and breeders, linked to the particularity of their sexual conduct
But,
nothing indicates that there is about them, in their group, a clear awareness of sickness
on the contrary, we find this consciousness linked to very specific social institutions
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. Illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
d. There are, [contrary to Benedict and Durkheim's definitions of disease:
negative
virtual
marginal
unable to fit into a culture
], in fact diseases which are recognized as such, and which have, within a group,
a status [i.e., a role in a system]
a function [i.e., an effect on a stateful world]
i. The pathological [under such a schema] is then, in relation to the cultural type,
no longer a mere deviant
it is one of the elements and one of the manifestations of this type [of culture]
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. Illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
[c. Durkheim's conception and that of American psychologists have in common that disease is envisaged there under an aspect that is both negative and virtual - cont'd]
ii. Virtual, since the content of the disease is defined by the possibilities, in themselves non-morbid, which manifest themselves there:
– for Durkheim, it is the statistical virtuality of a deviation from the mean
– for Benedict, the anthropological virtuality of the human essence
– In both analyses,
illness takes its place among the virtualities that serve as a margin to the cultural reality of a social group
it is to miss, without doubt, what is positive and real in the disease, such as it is present in a society
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. Illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
c. Durkheim's conception and that of American psychologists have in common that disease is envisaged there under an aspect that is both
negative [i.e., defined in terms of what it is not]
virtual [i.e., defined in terms of potentialities]
i. Negative, since the disease is defined in relation to
an average
a norm
a "pattern"
and that, in this gap, resides the whole essence of the pathological: the disease would be
marginal by nature
relative to a culture, only insofar as it is conduct that does not fit into it
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
[b. Durkheim thought of accounting for this relativity by a conception that was both evolutionary and statistical - cont'd]
iii. Lowie, studying the Crow Indians, cites one of them who
[on one hand,] possessed an exceptional knowledge of the cultural forms of his tribe
but [on the other hand,] he was incapable of facing physical danger
—In his form of culture, in which only aggressivity
is offered the possibility
gives value to behavior
his intellectual virtues got him taken for
irresponsible
incompetent
ultimately, sick
—“Just as are favoured,” says Benedict, “those whose natural reflexes are closest to that behavior which characterizes their society, so are those whose natural reflexes fall into that arc of behavior which does not exist in their civilization".
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. Illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
[b. Durkheim thought of accounting for this relativity by a conception that was both evolutionary and statistical - cont'd]
ii. Despite very different anthropological implications, the conception of American psychologists is not far from the Durkheimian perspective. Each culture, according to Ruth Benedict, would elect some of the potentialities which form the anthropological constellation of man:
such a culture, that of the Kwakiutl for example, takes as its theme the exaltation of the individual self, while that of the Zuni the radically excludes
aggression is a privileged conduct in Dobu, repressed among the Pueblos
From then on each culture will make of the disease an image whose profile is drawn by the whole of the anthropological potentialities which it neglects or which it represses.
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
[2. illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such - cont'd]
b. However, this relativity of the morbid fact is not immediately clear. Durkheim thought of accounting for it by a conception that was both
evolutionary
statistical
i. We would consider as pathological in a society the phenomena which, by deviating from the average,
[either] mark the outdated stages of a previous evolution
or announce the next phases of a development that is just beginning
“If we agree to call average type the schematic being that we would constitute by bringing together in a single whole, in a kind of abstract universality the most frequent characteristics of the species..., we can say that any deviation from this standard of health is a morbid phenomenon”
And he completes this statistical point of view, adding:
"A social fact can only be said to be normal for a given society in relation to an equally determined phase of its development" (Rules of sociological method)
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[A. The preceding analyses showed the forms of appearance of the disease, but not the conditions of appearance - cont'd]
2. Boutroux used to say, in his vocabulary, that even the most general psychological laws relate to a "phase of humanity." One fact has long since become the commonplace of sociology and mental pathology: illness only has its reality and its value as illness within a culture that recognizes it as such.
a. [Pyschotherapist Pierre] Janet's patient, who
had visions
presented stigmata
would have been, under other skies,
a mystical visionary
a thaumaturge
The obsessed who moves in the contagious universe of sympathies, seems, in his propitiatory gestures, to rediscover the practices of the primitive shaman: the rites by which he circumvents the object of his obsession take on a meaning, for us morbid, in this belief in the taboo whose equivocal power normally the primitive wants to conciliate, and secure the dangerously favorable complicity.
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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A. The preceding analyses [of mental illness, in relation to
organic pathology and evolution
individual history
existence
] have determined the coordinates by which one can situate the pathological within the personality. But if they showed the forms of appearance of the disease, they could not demonstrate the conditions of appearance.
1. [Under an expressivist schema,] the error would be to believe that
[either] organic evolution
or psychological history
or the situation of man in the world
can reveal these conditions. Undoubtedly, it is in them that
the disease manifests itself
its modalities, its forms of expression, its style are revealed
But it is elsewhere that the pathological fact has its roots [vis., an anthropology of
expression and recognition of madness in a culture
the history thereof]
– Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité, (Epilogue: The Conditions of Illness), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954
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[D. We have not followed the imagination in the total curve of the movement, we have only retraced its romance towards the oneiric - cont'd]
[3. An anthropology of expression would be more fundamental than an anthropology of the imagination - cont'd]
b. Therefore, by placing at the heart of imagination the meaning of the dream, [under such a schema]
i. one can
[on one hand,] restore the fundamental forms of existence
[but, on the other hand,] reveal its freedom
ii. one can also designate its happiness and its unhappiness, since
the unhappiness of existence is always writ in alienation
happiness, in the empirical order, can only be the happiness of expression
– Michel Foucault, Dream, Imagination and Existence: An Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's Le rêve et l'existence (part V: Le poète est aux ordres de sa nuit [The poet is under night's orders]—Jean Cocteau), 1954, translated by Forrest Williams
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[D. We have not followed the imagination in the total curve of the movement, we have only retraced its romance towards the oneiric - cont'd]
3. But all this has to do with an anthropology of expression which would be more fundamental, in our view, than an anthropology of the imagination.
a. We do not propose to outline it at this time. We only wanted to show all that Binswanger's text could bring to an anthropological study of the imaginary.
i. What he brought to light regarding dreams is the fundamental moment where the movement of existence discovers the decisive point of bifurcation between
those images in which it becomes alienated in a pathological subjectivity
expressions in which it fulfills itself in an objective history
ii. The imaginary is the milieu, the "element," of this choice.
– Michel Foucault, Dream, Imagination and Existence: An Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger's Le rêve et l'existence (part V: Le poète est aux ordres de sa nuit [The poet is under night's orders]—Jean Cocteau), 1954, translated by Forrest Williams
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