Abstract
Examining the hospitalization records of children and juveniles in the São Pedro Psychiatric Hospital, in Porto Alegre, one notices, in the hospitalization causes, essentialy moral aspects, with no specific relation to the diagnostics. Taking such discrepancy into analysis, we rescue, in the work of Michel Foucault, aspects which allow us to forge the notion of “power of normalization”. Using such concept, we conduct a genealogic research of the knowledges and techniques that turn the psychiatric hospitalization into an operation full of moral components, paying attention to the forces that constitute such a field in the São Pedro Psychiatric Hospital.
Keywords:
history of psychiatry; power of normalization; dangerous individual