Nikolas Rose:

The Biological Self

www.turbulens.net

Interview by

Peter Hinsby and Anders Fogh Jensen

You have analyzed what you termed the psy – sciences. Medicine is undoubtedly part of this discourse, but during the last couple of years there seems to be a shift in your focus to the new medical technologies or life-sciences. Why this shift and why now?

Rose: "I’ve been working on psychiatry for quite a long time. After my PhD thesis, "The psychological complex", was published in 1985, my next book was an initial analysis of the contemporary role of psychiatrists in regulating pathological – and normal - conduct. That book – an edited collection - was called "The Power of Psychiatry". One of the driving forces of the pieces in that book was to argue that the opposition between psychiatry and antipsychiatry wasn’t helpful – it wasn’t helpful just to be against psychiatry, or against one type of psy - psychiatry in favour of another - psychological intervention, or to see psychiatry as wholly a project of incarceration, of enclosure, of control. Together with my co-editor Peter Miller, I argued that such analyses in terms of social control were rather limited ways of trying to understand the role of psychiatry and its forms of expertise in contemporary societies. Instead of thinking about psychiatry as basically a carceral project to remove troublesome elements from society, I argued that one should see psychiatry as part of a far more general set of strategies to promote and manage mental health – I called this ‘ the discipline of mental health.’ "

Read the entire interview at Turbulens.net