Impact
Although Madness and Civilization has widely been read as a criticism of psychiatry, and often quoted in the anti-psychiatric movement, Foucault himself criticized, especially in retrospect, the "Romanticism of Madness", which tended to see madness as a form of genius which modern medicine represses. He did not contest the reality of psychiatric disorders, as some of his readers have concluded. Rather, he explored how "madness" could be constituted as an object of knowledge on the one hand, and, on the other hand, as the target of intervention for a specific type of power: the disciplinary institution of the asylum.
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