Mental Illness and Psychology Book

One of the learned professor’s earliest known writings, and very obviously a graduate student’s work.

The introduction is actually the best part, wherein the editor explains how the first draft (which is precisely not this text) was a more or less straightforward Marxist account of the issues at stake, and that the second draft substituted in heideggerian terminology for the Marxist arguments. Throughout, “the phrases are conveniently ambiguous. They could refer to his early Marxist analysis or to his later Heideggerian cultural account” (xxiv). Foucault revised it because of the “unstable relation of philosophical anthropology and social history” (xxvii), but after revision he “was not happy with the second version”—“and for good reasons,” as it became “an unstable synthesis [!] of early Heidegger’s existential account of Dasein as motivated by the attempt to cover up its nothingness and later Heidegger’s historical interpretation of our culture as constituted by its lack of understanding of the role of the clearing in both making possible and limited a rational account of reality” (id.).

Text proper states its purpose as “to show that mental pathology requires methods of analysis different from those of organic pathology and that it is only by an artifice of language that the same meaning can be attributed to ‘illnesses of the body’ and ‘illnesses of the mind.’ A unitary pathology using the same methods and concepts in the psychological and physiological domains is now purely mythical” (10). One kickass way this plays out is that “if this subjectivity of the insane is both a call to an abandonment of the world, is it not of the world itself that we should ask the secret of its enigmatic status?” (56).

Nice summary of Freudian theory follows, with the notion that there is a myth of a psychological substance, such as Freud’s libido or some other cat’s psychic force (24).
It has been said that the final chapters (64 ff) are essentially capsules of his later writings in Madness & Civilization and elsewhere; it is quite correct that these brief final chapters anticipate the later developments.

Probably not the best place to start with Foucault; maybe best left for Foucault maniacs.