ABSTRACT
Gerald Grob and Jacques Quen have been bitterly critical of "revisionist" historians of psychiatry on precisely these grounds, and their objections are not to be minimized, even though they apply with equal or greater force to those using them as a cudgel pour epa les autres. This chapter begins work on madness and its place in the social order in the early 1970s, the heyday of a romantic antipsychiatry that somehow attracted adherents ranging from the libertarian right to the self-consciously communitarian left. It work, like that of the antipsychiatrists, is thus marked by a pronounced skepticism concerning psychiatry's self-proclaimed rationality and disinterested benevolence, a skepticism rooted in what is, on the whole, a dismal and depressing historical record. Offering reflections on historical as well as contemporary issues, as the chapter have done here and elsewhere, carries with it both risks and potential benefits.
