Verso una psichiatria post-disciplinare. Michel Foucault e il dispositivo psichiatrico contemporaneo

From Michel Foucault’s investigations of disciplinary psychiatry, three operations can be enucleated: the production of subjectivity by subjecting bodies to “subject-functions”; the individuation of residual subjectivities of disciplinary power through the “absolute diagnosis” that dichotomously divides the population into normal and abnormal; and the confinement of the insane in a naturalistic determinism that places them in a state of non-freedom. Through analysis of the DSM and Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) diagnostic systems and by examining the reflections of Robert Castel, Nikola Rose and Alain Ehrenberg, this paper will attempt to show that contemporary post-disciplinary psychiatry tends to exclude the three operations identified by Foucault. First, the constitution of subjugated individualities gives way to a clinic of data in which subjectivity is fragmented into behavioral traits and biological markers. Second, the new diagnostic systems aim to replace the “absolute diagnosis” with a dimensional assessment that depolarizes the normal-abnormal dichotomy, deploying a process of optimization rather than normalization. Finally, the behaviorist matrix, within which contemporary psychiatry operates, aligns the healthy and the alienated on the same plane of irresponsibility and irrationality.