The Dangerous Classes: Retelling the Psychiatric Story

Abstract

This article examines the complex links between gender, class and the `psy' disciplines. It argues that there is a connection between those understandings of `class' embedded within contemporary `psy' discourse and the concepts utilized to render class intelligible when the working classes became a target and object of psychiatry in the l9th century. By adopting a form of historical-discursive inquiry informed by poststructuralist ideas (Foucault, 1971, 1972) the role that the `psy' disciplines play(ed) in problematizing aspects of social existence and rendering them in relation to sets of normalizing judgements is examined. The article highlights that from psychiatry's inception in the 19th century it has been bound up with governing and regulating a specific conception of personhood, arguing that `class' is one such mechanism through which this conception of sociality is governed, managed and administer-ed.