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The Psychology in Mental Illness and the Psychology by Michel Foucault

Abstract

Michel Foucault investigates “the history of the relations that the thought keeps with the truth” and disnaturalizes body, soul and psiqué as historical and discursive inventions, which have meaning only if included into the epistemique arrangements productions of truths, in the case, the emergence of modern thought, specially about human sciences, in general. This research studies the Foucault’s order of the speech on Psychology, in his book “Mental Ilness and Psychology”, with the aim of providing allowances for understanding the history of the speeches of Psychology, about the building of psychological subject and object and its subjectivateurs and contemporaries effects, by questioning the naturalization of conducts considered psychologically abnormal; as well as the application of the same principles of organic pathology to mental pathology, which, together with the postulate of the naturalization of psychological diseases as unitary species, would create the illusion of a real unity between mental and organic pathology, through the complex enunciative imbrication between mind and organism. It was found that for Foucault, the pathology of a certain psychological and individual history should not be reduced to the restricted phenomena of the existence and personalistic perception of the subject, which, inadvertently, could generate a blaming of the subject on the symptoms - organic-mental - inherent to his own conduct, in order to understand the emergence of homo psychologicus as a subject in the cultural and social history of humanity, with special emphasis on the historical production of mental illness figures.

Keywords:
Foucault; Psychology; psis knowledge; body/soul; madness

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