Das psychiatrische Aufschreibesystem
[The Psychiatric Notation System]

In the late 19th century, psychiatry developed a complex notation system. The contributions to this volume explore how these psychiatric notation practices simultaneously formed knowledge, established power constellations, and created ontologies of insanity. An analysis of the processes of notetaking, ordering, and writing reveals an intrinsic logic of observation, collection, recording, assessing, and interpretation in psychiatry. Acts of writing are usually initiated by the administration. They allow psychiatry access to legal services and accelerate the discipline’s internal differentiation. Writing scenes affect the patients’ utterances and, in turn, provoke phenomena that are themselves recorded. This generates a dynamic that advances the discipline, balances its position in society, stimulates ever greater differentiation, and, ultimately, transforms clinical, research, and social practice into one interminable project.