These statues were the most famous representations of madness at the time. The statues were placed at the entrance of the Bethlem (known as Bedlam) Hospital in London, one of the first and most notorious asylums in England. Caius Gabriel Cibber’s statues “Raving Madness” and “Melancholy Madness” (both made in 1677), depicted two men in the nude, half-lying on the ground, one aggravated and bound in shackles and the other in an infantilized position of weakness. Showalter describes the change in the symbolic conceptualization of the lunatic in the eighteenth century: “in the course of the century … the appealing madwoman gradually displaced the repulsive madman, both as a prototype of the confined lunatic and as a cultural icon.” Footnote 11 Showalter illustrates this change in cultural perception by showcasing two statues of mad men that had represented the figure of lunacy from the seventeenth century on, but were removed from the public by the early nineteenth century. It was the rationally sound mind that had the capacity to control and cure the irrationally mad one. In this way, the shift in psychiatric care was one of many arenas in which rationality became associated with men and irrationality with women. In the move toward less violent and more reparative care of the mentally ill, the subject in need of caring confinement became primarily female, and the treatment of her was in the hands of men and male doctors. Importantly, Showalter positions this shift next to another ideological change, when “the dialectic of reason and unreason took on specifically sexual meanings, and … the symbolic gender of the insane person shifted from male to female.” Footnote 10 Reason became synonymous with men and masculinity and unreason with women and femininity. Just as the criminal justice system underwent an overhaul from public punishments like torture and executions to “sophisticated” retributions aimed at rehabilitation, so the psychiatric establishment went from shunning the mad as definite outcasts to treating them as patients in need and in hope of saving. As a result of this ideological change English social reformers began to build asylums “in which paternal surveillance and religious ideals replaced physical coercion, fear and force.” Footnote 9 The attitude toward, and treatment of, the mentally ill thus went from being one of sensational disgust to protective pity.

This shift affected both popular imagination and actual practices of caring for the mentally ill. Where the mad had previously been seen as “unfeeling brutes, ferocious animals that needed to be kept in check with chains,” they were now regarded as sick human beings who might be returned to sanity under the correct care. One of the most significant changes brought on by the “new” epistemology of the psyche at the turn of the century was the move from the lunatic-as-animal to the lunatic-as-human, from nonperson to person. In relation to mental health and illness, governmentality allows us to think about how the social/political affects the organization of our psyches. Governmentality furthers our understanding of how the internalization of discipline works and takes hold of the individual at the level of subject formation. The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics that were developed later in Foucault’s career build on these analyses of penitentiary systems. When self-discipline has been properly internalized (supposedly in a successful process of rehabilitation), the powers that be have a hold on the individual, who will adjust his behavior in accordance to what best suits the dominant power structures. The control exercised over the individual through the enactment of disciplinary practices is just as efficient, if not more so, than the control of the body, because it initiates a deeper and more long-lasting grip on the soul. Footnote 5 According to Foucault, the change in the judicial system from publicly torturing its criminals to confining them with the purpose of rehabilitating or “curing” them, only had the appearance of being more humane. She looked at her reflection in the water After reflection I felt I had made the wrong decision The book is called `Reflections of a Politician'.Here I follow Foucault’s conceptualization of the epistemological shift of this turn of the century, which when it came to penitentiary systems, involved a move from punishing the body of the criminal to disciplining the soul.

Sad reflection synonym