Appraisal of reflective observation and penetrative observation in The History of Madness

The Foucault project can be called the genealogy of the modern subject and The History of Madness is one of his most important works in this field. Foucault emphasized on "observation" and its techniques in the formation of the subject as an object of knowledge. I distinguish between two types of observation in this book, which I call "reflective" and "penetrative" observation. In this article I try first to explain the reflective observation and its properties. Secondly, I show what social conditions in the 18th and 19th centuries led to reject this way of looking and gradually penetrative observation replaced reflective observation. Third, we explain the techniques of penetrative observation and show how this observation led to the emergence of psychology and psychiatry in the nineteenth century. This research is based on a library study method based on the original sources of medical history especially The History of Madness. Findings: Reflective observation did not, basically, involve observer; it involved only his monstrous surface, his visible animality; and it included at least one form of reciprocity, since the sane man could read in the madman, as in a mirror, the imminent movement of his downfall. Such a classical regime of truth did not construct madness as an object of enquiry and thus as subject to knowledge; it was simply a condition. By contrast, penetrative observation, arising with the new regime of the asylum was deeper and less reciprocal. In fact, penetrative observation is the object-maker, and because of this, it makes scientific knowledge: psychology and psychiatry. Thus, by establishing the asylum in the nineteenth century, the human being as a subject could become the object of scientific knowledge that was called psychology.