ПСИХИАТРИЧНА ЕКСПЕРТИЗА И ДЕВИАНТНО ПОВЕДЕНИЕ: КЪМ АРХЕОЛОГИЯТА НА СЪДЕБНО-МЕДИЦИНСКАТА ВЛАСТ
PSYCHIATRIC EXPERTISE AND DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR: TOWARD THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF JURIDICAL-MEDICAL POWER

Summary/Abstract: The paper is a further attempt to build a non-traditional sociology of social deviation, a sociology which goes beyond the “description”, the “explanation” and the “prognosis” of those “asocial” practices and reaches to the conditions of possibility of their existence. It is not a traditional one also because it does not take the deviant behaviour for granted and does not reduce its sociological examination to rendering a complete and rigorous classification into visible forms. It does not afterwards aim at “discovering” the factors and reasons which generated the deviations, the social structures and processes that reproduced them, all that by means of the “best grounded” theoretical model, by applying the “most adequate” scientific approach. On the contrary, through an inquiry into the relation between “truth and knowledge” in the framework of the present- day juridical-medical power, the paper demonstrates how the deviant behaviours were born, how a new normative space was gradually constituted and started to get fulfilled by deviant individuals. In short, the thesis states that the modern society, law and jurisdiction by means of the new principles and organization of the power to judge and punish had from within produced the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of the social deviations. In other words, the subject matter of that sociological research are the social, hence non-juridical and quasi-medical functions of one of the contemporary methods to regulate the deviant behaviours - the juridical psychiatric expertise and the “legitimate rights” related to it. The starting and guiding assumption is that this method for normalization and the very prerogatives to normalize stemming from it are not merely a result of the inclusion of medical knowledge into juridical power and vice versa. That is a kind of power which relies on the juridical and medical institutions but which also possesses its own autonomy, its own particular normativity and its own regulating rules in itself. As a matter of fact, the emergence of the power to normalize the deviant behaviours, the way it took shape, the way it had been constituted through a whole network of relations between different institutions constantly increase its strength in our society. That is the focus through which the emergence of the present-day juridical-medical order is analyzed.

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