Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975

by Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell (Translator)

Overview

From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. Attended by thousands, these were seminal events in the world of French letters. Picador is proud to be publishing the lectures in thirteen volumes.

The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense in "Society Must Be Defended," Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth century.

The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's work and offer a unique window into his thinking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429974059
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	04/01/2007
Series:	Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France , #4
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	600,696
File size:	607 KB

About the Author

The works of Michel Foucault include Madness and Civilization, The History of Sexuality, and Discipline and Punish. Series editor Arnold I. Davidson teaches at the University of Chicago and is executive editor of the journal Critical Inquiry.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was acknowledged as the preeminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, and continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines.

His books include The Government of Self and Others, The Courage of Truth, The Birth of Biopolitics, and The Punitive Society.

Graham Burchell (Translator) is the translator, and has written essays on Michel Foucault. He is an Editor of The Foucault Effect.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

8 January 1975

Expert psychiatric opinion in penal cases. ~ What kind of discourse is the discourse of expert psychiatric opinion? ~ Discourses of truth and discourses that make one laugh. ~ Legal proof in eighteenth-century criminal law. ~ The reformers. ~ The principle of profound conviction. ~ Extenuating circumstances. ~ The relationship between truth and justice. ~ The grotesque in the mechanism of power. ~ The psychological-moral double of the offense. ~ Expert opinion shows how the individual already resembles his crime before he has committed it. ~ The emergence of the power of normalization.

I WOULD LIKE TO begin this year's course by reading to you two expert psychiatric opinions in penal cases. The first is from 1955, exactly twenty years ago. It is signed by at least one of the prominent figures in penal psychiatry of that time and it concerns a case that some of you may still recall. It is the case of a woman and her lover who killed the woman's young daughter. The man, the woman's lover, was accused of complicity in the murder, or, at least, of incitement to murder the child, since it was established that the woman killed her child with her own hands. Here, then, is what the expert psychiatric opinion had to say about the man whom, if you don't mind, I will call A, because I have not yet been able to determine whether it is legally permissible to publish the testimony of a medico-legal expert that includes the names of those involved.

The experts are obviously uncomfortable with giving their psychological judgment on A in view of the fact that they cannot take a position on his moral culpability. Nevertheless, we will start from the hypothesis that, in some way or another, A exercised an influence over the mind of the girl, L, that led her to murder her child. Based on this hypothesis, then, this is how we picture the events and people involved. A is from an irregular and socially unstable background. He was an illegitimate child who was raised by his mother. His father acknowledged him only much later, and he lived with his half-brothers without there ever being any real family cohesion. This was even more the case when, after his father died, he found himself alone again with his mother, a rather disturbed woman. In spite of everything, he started secondary school. His origins must have had an effect on his natural pride: In short, individuals of this kind never feel well integrated into the world in which they find themselves; hence their love of paradox and of everything that creates disorder. They feel less out of place in a somewhat revolutionary climate of ideas [I remind you that this is 1955; M.F.] than in a more settled environment and philosophy. This is what happens with all intellectual reforms, with all coteries; it is the story of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, of existentialism, and so forth. Genuinely strong personalities may emerge in any movement, especially if they maintain a certain ability to adapt. They may thus achieve celebrity and found a stable school. But most cannot rise above mediocrity and seek to attract attention to themselves by wearing outlandish clothes or by performing extraordinary actions. In these people we find Alcibiadism3and Herostratism. Obviously, they no longer cut off the tail of their dog or burn the temple of Ephesus, but they sometimes allow themselves to be corrupted by hatred of bourgeois morality to the point of denying its laws and resorting to crime in order to inflate their personality, especially when this personality is naturally insipid. Naturally, in all of this there is an element of romantic daydreaming (bovarysme), of man's ability to imagine himself other than he is, and especially as more beautiful and great than he is by nature. This is why A could think himself a superman. However, it is odd that he was not influenced by his military experience, although he himself maintains that going to Saint-Cyr was character-forming. Nonetheless, military uniform did not seem to normalize Algarron's attitude to any great extent. Besides, he was always in a hurry to leave the army to go on his escapades. Another of A's psychological traits [that is, after bovarysme, Herostratism, and Alcibiadism; M.F.] is Don Juanism. He spent literally all of his free time collecting mistresses who were generally easy women like the young L. Then, showing a real lack of judgment, he held forth to them on topics they were hardly able to understand due to the low level of their education. He enjoyed presenting them with enormous — hénaurmes in Flaubert's spelling system — paradoxes, to which some listened openmouthed and to which others lent only half an ear. Just as a culture that was too advanced for his worldly and intellectual condition had not been very good for A, so the young L followed his lead in a distorted and tragic fashion. Here we are dealing with bovarysme at a new, lower level. She swallowed A's paradoxes, which had somehow intoxicated her. He seemed to her to have reached a higher intellectual plane. A talked about the need for a couple to do something extraordinary together in order to create an indissoluble bond: to kill a taxi driver, for example, or to kill a child for no reason, or merely to demonstrate their resolution. So the young L decided to kill Catherine. At least, this is what she claims. While A does not entirely accept this, he does not completely reject it since he admits to having expounded paradoxes to her, perhaps imprudently, that she, lacking a critical mind, may well have turned into a rule of action. Thus, without taking a position on the reality and degree of A's culpability, we can see how his influence on the young L could have been pernicious. However, our particular question is one of determining and presenting A's responsibility from a penal point of view. We again insist that there should be no misunderstanding of terms. We are not seeking to determine the extent of A's moral responsibility for the crimes committed by the young L: That is a matter for the magistrates and jurors. From a medicolegal point of view, we merely seek to determine whether the abnormalities of A's character have a pathological origin and whether they create a mental disorder that is enough to affect his penal responsibility. The answer will, of course, be negative. Clearly A was wrong not to confine himself to his courses at military school and, in love, to his weekend adventures, but nevertheless his paradoxes do not amount to delirious ideas. Of course, if A had not just imprudently propounded to the young L theories that were too complex for her to understand, if he intentionally pushed her to murder the child, whether in order perhaps to get rid of her, or to prove to himself his power of persuasion, or out of a pure perverse game, like Don Juan's in the scene of the poor man, then he is fully responsible. Our conclusions, which may be attacked from every side, can only be put forward in this conditional form. We run the risk in this case of being accused of exceeding our task and usurping the role of the jury by taking a position for or against the actual culpability of the accused, or again, of being reproached for being excessively laconic if we had said bluntly what, when it comes to it, should have sufficed: namely, that A presents no symptoms of mental illness and, generally speaking, is fully responsible.

This is a text from 1955. Forgive me for the length of these documents (although you can see at once why they raise questions). I would like now to quote from some much shorter documents, or rather, from an assessment of three men accused of blackmail in a sexual case. I will read the reports on at least two of the men. One of the men, let us call him X,

although not outstanding intellectually, is not stupid; he links his ideas together well and has a good memory. Morally, he has been homosexual since he was twelve or thirteen years old, and to begin with this vice could only have been a compensation for the teasing he suffered when, as a child raised by the social services, he lived in the Manche [the department; M.F.]. Perhaps his effeminate appearance aggravated this tendency toward homosexuality, but it was the lure of money that led him to blackmail. X is completely immoral, cynical, and even a chatterbox. Three thousand years ago he would certainly have been an inhabitant of Sodom, and the heavenly flames would have justly punished him for his vice. We should recognize, however, that Y [the object of the blackmail; M.F.] would have deserved the same punishment. Because he is, after all, elderly, relatively rich, and had nothing to offer X other than a place in a club for inverts for which he was the cashier, gradually getting back the money invested in this purchase. This Y, successively or simultaneously the active or passive lover of X, we do not know, arouses X's contempt and nausea. X loves Z. One has to have seen the effeminate appearance of both of them to understand how such a word can be used. It is a case of two men so effeminate that they would have had to live in Gomorrah rather than Sodom.

And so I could go on. As for Z:

He is a quite mediocre individual with a good memory and linking his ideas together well. Morally, he is a cynical and immoral individual. He wallows in depravity and is manifestly deceitful and reticent. One must literally practice a meiotic with regard to him [meiotic is written maïotique, doubtless something to do with a jersey (maillot)! M.F.]. But the most typical feature of his character seems to be an idleness whose importance can hardly be described. It is evidently less tiring to change records and find clients in a nightclub than it is to really work. Furthermore, he himself recognizes that he became homosexual from material necessity, from the attraction of money, and that having acquired a taste for money he persists in it.

Conclusion: "He is particularly repugnant."

You can see that there is both very little and a great deal that could be said about this kind of discourse. For, after all, in a society like ours, discourses that possess all three of the following properties are rare: The first property is the power to determine, directly or indirectly, a decision of justice that ultimately concerns a person's freedom or detention, or, if it comes to it (and we will see cases of this), life and death. So, these are discourses that ultimately have the power of life and death. Second property: From what does this power of life and death derive? From the judicial system perhaps, but these discourses also have this power by virtue of the fact that they function as discourses of truth within the judicial system. They function as discourses of truth because they are discourses with a scientific status, or discourses expressed exclusively by qualified people within a scientific institution. Discourses that can kill, discourses of truth, and, the third property, discourses — you yourselves are the proof and witnesses of this — that make one laugh. And discourses of truth that provoke laughter and have the institutional power to kill are, after all, in a society like ours, discourses that deserve some attention. They especially deserve our attention since, while the first of these expert opinions in particular concerned, as you have seen, a relatively serious, and so relatively rare case, what is at issue in the second case, which is from 1974 (it took place last year), is clearly the daily fare of penal justice and, I would say, of everyone subject to trial. These everyday discourses of truth that kill and provoke laughter are at the very heart of our judicial system.

This is not the first time that the functioning of judicial truth has not only raised questions but also caused laughter. You know that at the end of the eighteenth century — I spoke about it two years ago, I think — the way in which the proof of truth was administered in penal justice gave rise to both irony and criticism. You recall that in the both scholastic and arithmetical kind of judicial proof, which in the penal law of the eighteenth century was called legal proof, an entire hierarchy of quantitatively and qualitatively weighted proofs was distinguished. There were complete proofs and incomplete proofs, full proofs and semifull proofs, whole proofs and half proofs, indications and cavils. And then all these elements of proof were combined and added up to arrive at a certain quantity of proofs that the law, or rather custom, defined as the minimum necessary to get a conviction. At that point, on the basis of this arithmetic, of this calculus of proof, the court had to make its decision. And, to a certain extent at least, the court was bound in its decision by this arithmetic of proof. In addition to this legalization, this legal definition of the nature and quantity of the proof, apart from this legal formalization of the proof, there was the principle that punishment had to be proportional to the quantity of proofs assembled. That is, it was not enough to say that a full, whole, and complete proof must be reached in order to fix a punishment. Rather, classical law said: If the sum does not add up to that minimum degree of proof on the basis of which the full and entire penalty can be applied, if the addition remains in some way uncertain, if there is simply three-quarters proof and not a full proof in the total sum, nevertheless this does not mean that one should not punish. To a three-quarters proof corresponds a three-quarters penalty, to a semi proof, a semi penalty. In other words, one is not suspected with impunity. The least element of proof, or, in any case, a certain element of proof, will be enough to entail a certain element of penalty. At the end of the eighteenth century this practice of truth provoked the criticism and irony of reformers like Voltaire, Beccaria, Servan, and Dupaty.

It was to this system of legal proof, of the arithmetic of proof, that the principle called profound conviction (intime conviction) was opposed. When we see this principle at work today, and when we see the reaction of people to its effects, we have the impression that it authorizes conviction without proof. But, in fact, the principle of profound conviction had a perfectly precise historical meaning in the way it was formulated and institutionalized at the end of the eighteenth century.

First of all, it meant that one must no longer convict before reaching total certainty. That is to say, there must no longer be proportionality between the proof (démonstration) and the penalty. The penalty must conform to the law of all or nothing; a proof (preuve) that is not complete cannot entail a partial penalty. However light a penalty may be, it must be fixed only when the total, complete, exhaustive, and entire proof of the guilt of the accused has been established. This is the first meaning of the principle of profound conviction: the judge must convict only if he is profoundly convinced of guilt, and not merely if he has suspicions.

Second, the meaning of this principle is that not only proofs defined and qualified by the law can be accepted as valid. Rather, provided that it is probative — that is to say, provided it is by nature able to secure the support of any mind whatsoever open to truth, of any mind capable of judgment and therefore open to truth — any evidence must be admitted. It is not the legality of the proof, its conformity to the law, that makes it a proof: it is its demonstrability. The demonstrability of evidence makes it admissible.

Finally, and this is the third meaning of the principle of profound conviction, the criterion for recognizing that proof has been established is not the canonical table of good proofs, it is conviction: the conviction of any subject whosoever, of an indifferent subject. As a thinking subject, the subject is open to knowledge and truth. That is to say, with the principle of profound conviction we pass from the arithmetico-scholastic and ridiculous regime of classical proof to the common, honorable, and anonymous regime of truth for a supposedly universal subject.

Now this regime of universal truth, which penal justice has seemed to accept since the eighteenth century, in the way it is actually brought into play, in fact accommodates two phenomena, two facts, or two important practices that constitute, I think, the real practice of judicial truth and, at the same time, destabilize it with regard to the strict and general formulation of the principle of profound conviction.

First, you know that despite the principle that one must never punish before having arrived at proof, at the judge's profound conviction, in fact in practice a certain proportionality is always retained between the degree of certainty and the severity of the penalty imposed. You know perfectly well that when there is not complete certainty about an offense or crime, the judge — whether magistrate or jury — tends to translate this uncertainty into a mitigation of the penalty. A penalty that is mitigated to a greater or lesser extent, but a penalty nonetheless, corresponds to a certainty that has not been completely established. That is to say, even now in our system, and despite the principle of profound conviction, strong presumptions never go wholly unpunished. This is how extenuating circumstances operate.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Foreword: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana

Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson

One: 8 January 1975
Expert psychiatric opinion in penal cases. — What kind of discourse is the discourse of expert psychiatric opinion? — Discourses of truth and discourses that make one laugh. — Legal proof in eighteenth-century criminal law. — The reformers. — The principle of profound conviction. — Extenuating circumstances. — The relationship between truth and justice. — The grotesque in the mechanism of power. — The psychological-moral double of the offense. — Expert opinion shows how the individual already resembles his crime before he has committed it. — The emergence of the power of normalization.

Two: 15 January 1975
Madness and crime. — Perversity and puerility. — The dangerous individual. — The psychiatric expert can only have the character of Ubu. — The epistemological level of psychiatry and its regression in expert medico-legal opinion. — End of the antagonistic relationship between medical power and judicial power. — Expert opinion and abnormal individuals (les anormaux). — Criticism of the notion of repression. — Exclusion of lepers and inclusion of plague victims. — Invention of positive technologies of power. — The normal and the pathological.

Three: 22 January 1975
Three figures that constitute the domain of abnormality: the human monster, the individual to be corrected, the masturbating child. — The sexual monster brings together the monstrous individual and the sexual deviant. — Historical review of the three figures. — Reversal of their historical importance. — Sacred embryology and the juridico-biological theory of the monster. — Siamese twins. — Hermaphrodites: minor cases. — The Marie Lemarcis case. — The Anne Grandjean cases.

Four: 29 January 1975
The moral monster. — Crime in classical law. — The spectacle of public torture and execution (la supplice). — Transformation of the mechanisms of power. — Disappearance of the ritual expenditure of punitive power. — The pathological nature of criminality. — The political monster: Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. — The monster in Jacobin literature (the tyrant) and anti-Jacobin literature (the rebellious people). — Incest and cannibalism.

Five: 5 February 1975
In the land of the ogres. — Transition from the monster to the abnormal (l'anormal). — The three great founding monsters of criminal psychiatry. — Medical power and judicial power with regard to the notion of the absence of interest. — The institutionalization of psychiatry as a specialized branch of public hygiene and a particular domain of social protection. — Codification of madness as social danger. — The motiveless crime (crime sans raison) and the tests of the enthronement of psychiatry. — The Henriette Cornier case. — The discovery of the instincts.

Six: 12 February 1975
Instinct as grid of intelligibility of motiveless crime and of crime that cannot be punished. — Extension of psychiatric knowledge and power on the basis of the problematization of instinct. — The 1838 law and the role claimed by psychiatry in public security. — Psychiatry and administration regulation, the demand for psychiatry by the family, and the constitution of a psychiatric-political discrimination between individuals. — The voluntary-involuntary axis, the instinctive and the automatic. — The explosive of the symptomatological field. — Psychiatry becomes science and technique of abnormal individuals. — The abnormal: a huge domain of intervention.

Seven: 19 February 1975
The problem of sexuality runs through the field of abnormality. — The old Christian rituals of confession. — From the confession according to a tariff to the sacrament of penance. Development of the pastoral. — Louis Habert's Pratique du sacrament de pénitence and Charles Borromée's (Carlo Borromeo) Instructions aux confesseurs. — From the confession to spiritual direction. — The double discursive filter of life in the confession. — Confession after the Council of Trent. — The sixth commandment: models of questioning according to Pierre Milhard and Louis Habert. — Appearance of the body of pleasure and desire in penitential and spiritual practices.

Eight: 26 February 1975
A new procedure of examination: the body discredited as flesh and the body blamed through the flesh. — Spiritual direction, the development of Catholic mysticism, and the phenomenon of possession. — Distinction between possession and witchcraft. — The possessions of Loudon. — Convulsion as the plastic and visible form of the struggle in the body of the processed. — The problem of the possessed and their convulsions does not belong to the history of illness. — The anti-convulsives: stylistic modulation of the confession and spiritual direction; appeal to medicine; recourse to disciplinary and educational systems of the seventeenth century. — Convulsion as neurological model of mental illness.

Nine: 5 March 1975
The problem of masturbation between the Christian discourse of the flesh and sexual psychopathology. — Three forms of the somatization of masturbation. — The pathological responsibility childhood. — Prepubescent masturbation and adult seduction; the offense come from outside. — A new organization of family space and control: the elimination of intermediaries and the direct application of the parent's body to the child's body. — Cultural involution of the family. — The medicalization of the new family and the child's confession to the doctor, heir to the Christian techniques of the confession. — The medical persecution of childhood by means of restraint of masturbation. — The constitution of the cellular family that takes responsibility for the body and life of the child. — Natural education and State education.

Ten: 12 March 1975
What makes the psychoanalytic theory of incest acceptable to the bourgeois family (danger comes from the child's desire. — Normalization of the urban proletariat and the optimal distribution of the working-class family (danger comes from fathers and brothers). — Two theories of incest. — The antecedents of the abnormal psychiatric-judicial mesh and psychiatric-familial mesh. — The problematic of sexuality and the analysis of its irregularities. — The twin theory of instinct and sexuality as epistemologico-political task of psychiatry. — The origins of sexual psychopathology (Heinrich Kaan). — Etiology of madness on the basis of the history of t he sexual instinct and imagination. — The case of the soldier Bertrand.

Eleven: 19 March 1975
A mixed figure: the monster, the masturbator, and the individual who cannot be integrated within the normative system of education. — The Charles Jouy case and a family plugged into the new system of control and power. — Childhood as the historical condition of the generalization of psychiatric knowledge and power. — Psychiatrization of infantilism and constitution of a science of normal and abnormal conduct. — The major theoretical constructions of psychiatry in the second half of the nineteenth century. — Psychiatry and racism: psychiatry and social defense.

Course Summary

Course Context

Index of Notions and Concepts

Index of Names