Coordination Funds

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The history of psychiatry is a history of the difference between normality and madness. However, this difference is progressively eroding. On the one hand, with the opening of psychiatric institutions and the social integration of inmates, madness is becoming everyday normality; on the other hand, reaction patterns and behaviours such as intoxication, stress or attention deficit are pathologised. The collapse of this basic dichotomy calls the interpretative power of extant historical narratives of psychiatry back into question.This is the starting point and basic assumption of the proposed research group: It does not attempt to track changes in concepts of insanity, but focuses on the erosion of the difference between normal and pathological in dealing with psychic alterity. The overarching goal of the projects participating in the FOR is to mobilize hitherto underexplored tendencies in psychiatry as a resource for contemporary history.This goal will be achieved by a decentralisation of the previous topography of the history of psychiatry. Phenomena cutting through established themes shall come into focus: 1. Actor-constellations involving other professional groups than psychiatrists; 2. Logics and spaces that, besides the conventional institutions and their traditional alternatives, include economical and participatory rationalities, thus revealing other ecologies and artistic interventions; 3. Methodical approaches to practices and techniques of interaction and negotiation in the psychiatric field, including the use of media, strategies of communication and of appropriation. Through this decentring of the history of psychiatry, the FOR aims not merely at cataloguing the conspicuous erosion of traditional categories, but especially at outlining a history of change in the relations with alterity, which challenges the extant historiography. The final aim is to sketch a contemporary history of psychiatry on the model of an anthropology of the present, capable of making the present interpretative schemes of normality/madness amenable to historical analysis.In order to include ethnological/ethnographic, historical/sociological, cultural and literary approaches, the research group consists of scholars from different disciplines. At the same time, it keeps a focus on medical history in order to include the reference disciplines of psychiatry, psychology and social work in the research.