This article aims studying the course held by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France in 1973-1974. The records of this course were published in 2003 under the name " Psychiatric power" . The objective was to compare the different ways in which Foucault analyzes the question of madness in " Psychiatric power" and in " History of Madness in the Classical Age" (1961). It is a comparative study about the different ways of analyzing madness developed by Michel Foucault during the archeological and genealogic periods of his work. The absence of the body; binary diagnosis; the description of the surface of symptoms; the classification of diseases more similar to the botanical classification than to pathology; the process of cure directly linked to restitution of behaviors and moral values; as well as the over-power of the psychiatrist, seem to speak about the persistence of an old model of power, a pre-modern and pre-capitalist model, a residue of the old sovereign power.
Foucault; Psychiatry; Medical knowledge; Psychiatric institutions