Conference Program

This contribution aims to investigate the relationship between studies on “les anormaux” in Michel Foucault and the French institutionalist movement’s research on the “débiles mentaux”. While Foucault’s studies reconstruct the genesis and emergence of a psychiatric power aimed at normalizing and confining deviant subjects, the psychoanalytic theories of Maud Mannoni and the practical experiments of Oury outline a path for removing children from the institutional circuits of medicine and pedagogy. This demonstrates that the movement for deinstitutionalization in France drew on diverse contributions which were able to (i) reconstruct the discourses of psychiatric power, (ii) oppose them with a counter-theory grounded in psychoanalytic anti-alienism, and (iii) offer practical experiments differently dealing with the spectrum of abnormality.

In his studies on the abnormal, Foucault insists on the emergence of a medical power that, through psychiatry, attempts to impose a normalization of behavior. On the one hand, a general theory of degeneration took shape; on the other, it was supported by a wide institutional network of control, internment, and care, situated at the boundaries of medicine and justice. This network functioned both as a structure for receiving the abnormal and as a defense of society. From that point onward, a technique of normalization and segregation was tasked with taking charge of the irregular individual.

Indeed, still in the postwar period in France, les débiles mentaux are placed in an institutional circuit of care and treatment that was essentially custodial in nature. In this sense, for Mannoni, the “transformative” effect — rather than merely “descriptive” — produced by diagnosis is very clear. So, she emphasizes the condition of emergence of the symptom reducing the organic explanation and instead pointing to the living conditions and situations that cause the “illness” to arise. The evolution of the patient in different contexts, in fact, challenges the notion of organic deficiency.

From an operational standpoint, it was Oury who developed the most promising responses along these lines. He organized space and time in the classroom in such a way as to enable a series of operations allowing children to exercise agency and speech within their living environment. Against the institution that compels silence, his techniques enable the classroom to become an open and therapeutic space capable of healing or providing prophylaxis—an environment within which it becomes possible to evolve, also through the recovery of autonomy and speech.

Thus, while in Foucault there is a denunciation of a power of normalization exerted upon the deviant child, the theories of Mannoni are able to disavow the theoretical foundations of segregation. Oury’s practices, in turn, offer a set of solutions through a counter-institutional form of schooling capable of welcoming the child rather than psychiatrizing them. All this constituted the theoretical and practical background for the emergence of a season of (de)institutional reforms in favor of people with disabilities, the mentally ill, the mad, and the abnormal of every kind. Rediscovering this legacy is particularly valuable today, at a time when new institutionalizing tendencies are reappearing in institutional practices and political orientations.