Foucault, Michel, and Arnold I. Davidson. 2006. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France 1973-1974. 1st ed. Palgrave Macmillan.

Notes on Chapter Twelve

Examines Charcot’s creation of the neurological body and situates it in comparison to the body of
pathological anatomy.

Pathological anatomy obsessed with surface and the reading of signs on the body (Bichat, Lännec).

Pathological anatomy: STIMULUS > EFFECT
Neurology: STIMULUS > RESPONSE

“Neuropathology now provides the clinical instrument by which it is thought the individual can be captured at the level of this will itself” (302).

KEY POINT: Neurological apparatus not focused on giving a stimulus and observing the effects (”Lie down”, “Bend your leg”) instead it is based around instruction and injunction and then interpretation of the response with an interest in perceiving the hidden will or truth (302-305).

“responses which can be clinically deciphered at the level of the body and which one can consequently submit to a differential examination without fear of being duped by the subject who responds” (304).

Hysteria is made possible as an illness because of this shift to perceived effects rather than surface responses. Charcot pathologized hysterics.

Foucault asserts that it was the “maelstrom” and “struggle” between the medical apparatus and its subjects that “summoned” symptoms (309).

However, for hysteria to be an illness it must be stable as opposed to the unstable nature of madness (309-310).

In response Charcot develops hypnosis and suggestion.

Also, naturalized patients are needed that are not already within the medical apparatus. A “natural hysteria.” New category of the insured patient appears. “Illness is consequently intertwined with the whole economic problem of profit” (313).

Connections to religious healing in the theatricality (315).

Trauma arises as the replacement for anatomical lesion. The hidden source.

ISSUE: Foucault sees Charcot (as opposed to his student Freud) shunning any connection between sexual trauma and hysteria because it somehow undermined the or “disqualified” the process. Unclear as to why this is. Perhaps sexuality is considered psychic and not natural?

FINAL POINT: Hysteria as a form of performative resistance or “countermaneuver” in response to the “ascription of trauma.” Sexuality as a “victory cry” and not an “indecipherable remainder” (322).

Hysterics respond to the pressure of doctors and the pathologizing gaze by offering an originary source which cannot be rectified in their system. Hysterics create a new body through this discourse, the sexual body.

CONNECTION: Michael Hardt “Affective Labor” - ‘biopower from below’