| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain. Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe. Foreword by Jerrold Seigel. Translated by Catherine Porter. (New French Thought.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1999. Pp. xxvi, 323. $29.95.

Following the appearance of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization in 1961, madness became one of the measures by which "progress" was measured. And since neither "madness" nor "progress" was clearly defined as either a "good" or "bad" thing, one could make a series of contradictory arguments using more or less the same evidence. Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, in a concise and extremely well-translated version of their La pratique de l'espirt humaine (1980), continued the Foucauldian model of seeing in the history of madness the key to the "progress" of the West. For them, as opposed to Foucault, it was a progress that led to institutions with greater and greater inhumanity and less and less true freedom. But in their retelling, all of these institutions failed. 1

Beginning with Philippe Pinel's "freeing of the insane" as one of the projects of the French Revolution and continuing through the creation of the modern asylum by J. E. D. Esquirol, Gauchet and Swain sketch a detailed history of the institutional models for insanity. Their tale seems to end in the horrors of a totalitarian psychoanalysis under that other famous Austrian, Sigmund Freud. For them, this project, too, had failed, and they were writing (in 1980) now liberated by the shackles that Freudian psychoanalysis had put upon the freedom of the psyche. . . .

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