O CAMPO DISCURSIVO DA HISTÓRIA DA LOUCURA

Abstract

This article defends the thesis that Michel Foucault's 1961 work, History of madness, inaugurated a discursive field, a legacy of his historiographic and philosophical project. Robert Castel's 1977 work, The Regulation of Madness, and 1978's Danação da Norma, organized by Roberto Machado, explicitly registered in this field. The defense of the proposal is guided by a reading (receptio) of Foucault's work to privilege the background project, while it opens the possibility of continuity of a line of research and new narratives, the discursive field of the history of madness. In this effort, the rest of the author's work is also taken into account, notably Discipline and Punish, to collect, from the history of disciplinary surveillance and penal punishment, elements that clarify the project of the history of madness. Then, an attempt is made to deepen what would be a discursive field and the elements of possible analogy or opposition with the discursive fields of psychoanalysis and marxism are discussed. Finally, there are differences in the history of madness in relation to antipsychiatry and depsychiatrization. Throughout the course, the article try to show that the history of madness is not a discipline, since it is not a history of psychiatry, and has different strategic objectives, not to say opposites, of the new discipline called 'philosophy of psychiatry'.