Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.22586/ss.20.1.11
Hunting Down the Degenerates. Psychiatry and the Normalization of Croatian Civil Society: Miloš Krpan, a case study
Mislava Bertoša
Tvrtko Vuković
orcid.org/0000-0003-0629-5367
Abstract
Focusing on the psychiatric case of Miloš Krpan, one of our first socialists and anarchists who was twice admitted to the Royal Institute for Mentally Insane in Stenjevec at the end of the 19th century, the paper aims to show how, by participating in the construction of Croatian civil society, psychiatry develops medical knowledge but also normalizes power. Psychiatry pacifies the resistance against the system by dislocating it to the Institute where it is further examined, processed, mastered and disciplined. At the same time, it acquires scientific legitimacy and gains social status by producing a category of the abnormal and by developing techniques to repress it. Thus, it assumes responsibility for social morale, security and purity, and by associating itself with judicial practice it becomes one of the main legal authorities. In other words, apart from seeking to cure insanity, psychiatry emerges as an apparatus of social discipline and establishes modern forms of normalizing power in the young bourgeois capitalist society of the second half of the 19th century.
Keywords
history of psychiatry; abnormality; degeneration; normalization; Miloš Krpan
Hrčak ID:
251756
URI
Publication date:
2.11.2020.
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