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In his 1954 book Mental Illness and Personality Foucault combines the subjective experience of the mentally ill person with a sociocultural historical approach to mental illness and suggests that there exists a reciprocal connection between individual perception and sociocultural development. This article examines the ramifications of these connections in Foucault's 1954 works and the connection with his later historical works. The article also examines the similarities between Foucault's 1954 thoughts and contemporary intellectual thought, such as those outlined in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology and in Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem's historical epistemology. In sum, my study shows that Foucault's historical analysis began long before his 1961 dissertation History of Madness. It also shows that, more than announcing the "death" of the subject, Foucault's historical analysis may have contributed to saving it.

By changing his primary concepts—abstraction, alienation, dream, morale, and power—Foucault changed his perception of mental illness and the history and philosophy of psychology throughout his career. Nevertheless, despite conceptual changes, it seems that Nietzsche’s genealogical view of knowledge and the historical power–body conjunction runs like a red thread through Foucault’s works as early as 1961. This article highlights Foucault’s coherent and divergent views on the history and philosophy of psychology and their effects on his theories, findings, and contributions.

can existential themes, such as anxiety, the will to die, or our simultaneous will to live forever be logically described? does a literary language or philosophical and psychiatric term exist that can express phenomena nonreferential to the external world? In short, does a genre exist that can redefine the relationships between symbol and meaning? drawing upon various theoretical perspectives developed by Michel Foucault, Ludwig Binswanger, gaston Bachelard, and Karl Jaspers, this paper discusses the ability to depict life as we are living it, whether it is a product of mental illness or a matter of normal schizophrenic imaginings. M ental illness and imaginings affect people of all ages, races, religions, and incomes. Mental illness as such is not the result of personal weakness, lack of character, or poor upbringing. Instead, mental illness shows incredible creativity in terms of behavior and thought. nevertheless, it also disrupts a person's thoughts, feelings, mood, ability to relate to others, and the capacity to cope with the ordinary demands of life. The understanding of mental illness as a medical condition includes diagnoses such as major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder (ocd), panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTsd), and borderline personality disorder. In 2012, the american Psychiatric association (aPa) approved a set of updates, revisions, and changes to the reference manual used to diagnose mental disorders. The revision of the manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (dsM), is the first significant update in nearly

Summary 1In his series of lectures, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Michel Foucault employs concepts from the military field of knowledge in order to analyse the founding scenes of psychiatry. I focus on three issues connected to Foucault's use of these military terms. Firstly, I examine why Foucault was reluctant to use concepts from sociology and psychology in Le pouvoir psychiatrique and how this affects the notions that he had formulated in his earlier work, Histoire de la folie. Secondly, I show how he challenges traditional understandings of the founding scenes of psychiatry by using concepts from a different field of knowledge. In doing this, he creates metaphors, and this is something that he himself had previously been critical of doing. Thirdly, I reflect upon the fact that Foucault's creative use of concepts from different disciplines and examples from different historical times can be related to episodes in his own life; I argue why it is important to supplement a structural analysis with linguistic, phenomenological and hermeneutical ones.