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Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth
In an original and provocative study of suicide, Ian Marsh examines the historical and cultural forces that have influenced contemporary thought, practices and policy in relation to this serious public health problem. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, the book tells the story of how suicide has come to be seen as first and foremost a matter of psychiatric concern. Marsh sets out to challenge the assumptions and certainties embedded in our beliefs, attitudes and practices concerning suicide and the suicidal, and the resulting account unsettles and informs in equal measure. The book will be of particular interest to researchers, professionals and students in psychology, history, sociology and the health sciences.
264 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2010
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About the author
Ian Marsh
2 books1 followerIan Marsh is ANZSOG Professor of Government at the Graduate School of Government, University of Sydney. He is also Director of Research for the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia. His recent studies include (with David Yencken) Into the Future: The Neglect of the Long Term in Australian Politics (Black Inc, 2005), an edited review of democratisation in the Asian region (Democratisation, Governance and Regionalism, Routledge, forthcoming 2006) and another on globalisation (Globalisation and the People, Routledge, forthcoming 2006).
Current work involves a comparative study of the decline in democratic governance in Australia and parallel countries. He was educated at the University of Newcastle and at Harvard.
Current work involves a comparative study of the decline in democratic governance in Australia and parallel countries. He was educated at the University of Newcastle and at Harvard.
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December 16, 2019
A Foucauldian genealogy of the psychopathologicalization of suicide in western psychiatry which critiques the notion of an ahistorical, pathological constitution of suicide and instead argues that its modern constitution is contingent on historical and cultural forces.
Begins by mapping out how contemporary truths on suicide assume a pathological nature and of a transparent, unified interiority, their truth-effects, and how they are reified by contemporary discourse through the circular relations of knowledge-to-power and power-to-knowledge. Then gives an account on the variety of forms of self-accomplished death in Greco-Roman culture, and their lack of interiority owing to a sense of selfhood vastly different from modern conceptions.
Marsh goes on to map how the shift from repressive to productive power affected the treatment of the ``mad'', leading to confinement at asylums which became centers of knowledge-generation. He goes into detail at how confinement justified knowledge-generation (and how these knowledges in turn justified further confinement) through the constitution of insanity in relation to suicide, and, reciprocally, how suicide was constituted in relation to insanity. He traces how this reciprocal constitution changed under different economies of power, from a punitive economy of power which punished suicide as a transgression against the Church and state which could only react to suicide through punishment of the descendants, to a medicalized one which offered the possibility of prevention (as an extension of bio-power) through confinement and treatment. He goes over how suicide was medicalized from the 17th century onward: through linguistic shifts and a physicalist conception of the body in the 17th century; to the removal of agency with recourse to overwhelming passions which then invested medical authorities with responsibility over their patients; the initial recourse to pathological anatomies, then impulses that overwhelm an instinct to self-preservation, and to constitutional weakness which justified the shift from physical confinement to moral constraint in the 19th century which reinforced psychiatry's moral role; and finally the proliferation of psychoanalytic accounts which increased the depth of psychiatric power by subsuming all of the patient's behaviors and mental states, the failure of sociological accounts to challenge dominance of psy-discourses, and the reassertion of psychiatry's dominance through psychological autopsies which increased the breadth of psychiatry from the asylum/ward to the whole community in the 20th century (and how it continues to do so in the 21st century). Throughout this he shows how all this affected how patients and practitioners were constituted in relation to the changing discursive formations and how these processes of subjection can be problematic.
Marsh ends with a reading of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis as an example of how modern patients are constituted as suicidal subjects, how problematic it can be, and how the patient (aware of this) can resist such a constitution. He draws attention to Kane's refusal to merely echo psychiatric assumptions of a unified, transparent self which is the location of pathologies and meaning, instead offering a fragmented and contingent self lacking any essential features, while still representing suicide as pathological and individual in nature.
The most glaring fault, which Marsh concedes in the book, is that, in typical Foucauldian fashion, it places more emphasis on textual discourse than on analyzing discursive practices. Neither ascribing to a voluntarist position nor blind acceptance of psychiatric assumptions, Marsh's critique aims to draw scrutiny to what is commonly thought as ahistorical and universal.
Begins by mapping out how contemporary truths on suicide assume a pathological nature and of a transparent, unified interiority, their truth-effects, and how they are reified by contemporary discourse through the circular relations of knowledge-to-power and power-to-knowledge. Then gives an account on the variety of forms of self-accomplished death in Greco-Roman culture, and their lack of interiority owing to a sense of selfhood vastly different from modern conceptions.
Marsh goes on to map how the shift from repressive to productive power affected the treatment of the ``mad'', leading to confinement at asylums which became centers of knowledge-generation. He goes into detail at how confinement justified knowledge-generation (and how these knowledges in turn justified further confinement) through the constitution of insanity in relation to suicide, and, reciprocally, how suicide was constituted in relation to insanity. He traces how this reciprocal constitution changed under different economies of power, from a punitive economy of power which punished suicide as a transgression against the Church and state which could only react to suicide through punishment of the descendants, to a medicalized one which offered the possibility of prevention (as an extension of bio-power) through confinement and treatment. He goes over how suicide was medicalized from the 17th century onward: through linguistic shifts and a physicalist conception of the body in the 17th century; to the removal of agency with recourse to overwhelming passions which then invested medical authorities with responsibility over their patients; the initial recourse to pathological anatomies, then impulses that overwhelm an instinct to self-preservation, and to constitutional weakness which justified the shift from physical confinement to moral constraint in the 19th century which reinforced psychiatry's moral role; and finally the proliferation of psychoanalytic accounts which increased the depth of psychiatric power by subsuming all of the patient's behaviors and mental states, the failure of sociological accounts to challenge dominance of psy-discourses, and the reassertion of psychiatry's dominance through psychological autopsies which increased the breadth of psychiatry from the asylum/ward to the whole community in the 20th century (and how it continues to do so in the 21st century). Throughout this he shows how all this affected how patients and practitioners were constituted in relation to the changing discursive formations and how these processes of subjection can be problematic.
Marsh ends with a reading of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis as an example of how modern patients are constituted as suicidal subjects, how problematic it can be, and how the patient (aware of this) can resist such a constitution. He draws attention to Kane's refusal to merely echo psychiatric assumptions of a unified, transparent self which is the location of pathologies and meaning, instead offering a fragmented and contingent self lacking any essential features, while still representing suicide as pathological and individual in nature.
The most glaring fault, which Marsh concedes in the book, is that, in typical Foucauldian fashion, it places more emphasis on textual discourse than on analyzing discursive practices. Neither ascribing to a voluntarist position nor blind acceptance of psychiatric assumptions, Marsh's critique aims to draw scrutiny to what is commonly thought as ahistorical and universal.
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