The anti-psychiatry approach reexamined through the work of Michel de Certeau

Although the work of Michel de Certeau is gaining a wider audience, the fact that his studies might make a contribution to institutional psychiatry has not been considered until now. The recurrence of some of the questions that the anti-psychiatry movement raised at the end of the 1960s could well find a new impetus in de Certeau's work, not in the denunciation of the social order but in the increasingly closer attention paid to the inventive and original approaches adopted by patients and therapists. When the concepts of de Certeau are compared with those of his most well-known contemporaries (Foucault, Derrida), a reassessment is called for regarding representations underlying contemporary institutional psychiatry. (C) 2003 Elsevier SAS. Tons droits reserves.