Cornelius Borck, Armin Schäfer (ed./eds.)

Das psychiatrische Aufschreibesystem
[The Psychiatric Notation System]

Wilhelm Fink Verlag, München 2015, 271 pages
ISBN 978-3-7705-5773-8

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.

Event

Workshop der DFG-Forschergruppe Kulturen des Wahnsinns
21 Mar 2013 – 23 Mar 2013

Wahnsinn und Methode. Notieren, Ordnen, Schreiben in der Psychiatrie

Institut für Medizingeschichte und Wissenschaftsforschung der Universität Lübeck, Königstraße 42, Hörsaal

Details