Antropologia e doença mental em Foucault: Caminhos do homem rumo à perda de sua verdade

Abstract

This article aims to examine some elements of anthropology in Foucault’s thought whose genesis lies in the history of psychology. Until the publication, in 1962, of a new version of Mental illness and personality [1954], Foucault's works do not present any critique to anthropology as a legitimate thought about man, critique which became famous from the sixties. In this second version, whose title was changed to Mental illness and Psychology, mental illness turns to be considered under an archaeological point of view, from their "historical conditions”. This new way of considering the "history of the phenomena" gives rise to the project of History of Madness [1961] and to the critique of psychology as a pseudo-scientific project which, under the background of a supposed justification of human sciences, forges its own truth of man, a model that provides justification for the subjection of human individuals to moral evaluation by the knowledge, and for an ethical control by therapeutic, educational, political and juridical practices in the western world.