The medicalization and social history of emotions 3500-FAKM-MHISSPOL

One of the essential dimensions of contemporary social change is the transition from the religious order to the medical order. Classes will be devoted to reading and interpreting texts dealing with the process of individualization and modeling of subjectivity in Western culture since the eighteenth century. The subject of interest will be institutions shaping the ways of dealing with suffering and building valid interpretations of the causes of suffering. The starting point will be Michel Foucault's classic work The History of Madness, which initiated research on knowledge, power and the psyche and proposed a perspective for the interpretation of modern subjectivity entangled in opposition – care and violence, control and self-control, liberation and repression, medical and romantic narratives, sacralization of the interior and commodification of subjectivity. The subject of interest will be the history of institutions and therapeutic discourses regulating the ways in which individuals experience themselves and the paradoxes associated with the history of the emancipation of the individual obliged to produce himself as a free man. The proposed literature will allow to analyze the dominant and recommended models of subjectivity and handling of suffering and failure in various institutions and contexts – family, private life, love, work, public life, class inequalities.