Historiographies, practices and aesthetics of an eroding difference (Normal#verrückt)

The project at a glance

Start date:

01 Jun 2021
Duration in months:

36
Funding:

Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR)
Principal Investigator(s):

Benoît MAJERUS

About

The history of psychiatry is a history of the difference between “normal” and “crazy”. However, this difference is becoming increasingly fragile. On the one hand, with the opening of the psychiatric institutions and the integration of the inmates into society, the crazy gains an everyday normality; on the other hand, behaviours and reactions such as intoxication, stress or attention deficit are pathologized and the subject of psychiatric interventions. This means that the narratives of psychiatry historiography that have been tried and tested so far lose their power of interpretation, which is precisely due to the dichotomy that is currently in question. This is where the research group comes in. It does not try to trace a change in the concepts of madness, but focuses on the erosion of the difference between normal and mad in dealing with psychological alterity.