ABSTRACT
Madness and Civilisation (1961) emerged as a response to Foucault’s studies of psychology and the history of psychiatry. The book is based on 21,000 documents, spanning from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. It refers to a large archive of material acquired by the library of Uppsala from a certain Dr Erik Waller that included a collection of the doctor’s own research into the history of medicine. The Swedish archive was beneficial for Foucault and he explored it systematically (Eribon 1993: 83). Madness and Civilisation is the outcome of this research but also of Foucault’s own experience and of suspicion towards modern psychiatry, which he saw as a form of control that preserved conventional morality.
