The Birth of the Asylum

"The place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum." -- Havelock Ellis

With the advent of change in mental asylums (chains were removed, patients were allowed to roam free), the asylum no longer punished the madman’s guilt, it aided in his therapeutic rebirth—while stilkl remaing a “stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason” (166). Instead, it organized that guilt as a consciousness of himself, and in a relation to his keeper. It “organized it for the man of reason as an awareness of the other, a therapeutic intervention in the madman’s existence” (146). The asylum reduces differences, represses vice, eliminates irregularities. It opposes everything that goes against the virtues of society. The asylum is an instrument of moral uniformity. Pinel organized his asylum by three means: first, silence; second, recognition by mirror; and third, perpetual judgement. There exists a complement to the old rites of Order, Authority and Punishment, demystified by Freud. In addition, Freud abolished “silence and observation; he eliminated madmen’s recognition of itself in the mirror; he silenced the instances of condemnation; he exploited the structure that envelop the medical personage; he amplified its thaumaturgical virtues, preparing it for its omnipotence a quasi-divine status” (165). Nonetheless, psychiatry remains a “stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason” (166).