Para una genealogía de la anormalidad: la teoría de la degeneración de Morel

Abstract

Here we analyze Morel's theory of degeneration as it was presented in his Treatise of the degeneration of human species, published in 1857. This text originated as an attempt to answer difficulties that had to be faced by the nascent psychiatry. Following it, there began to be constructed an epistemological ground that made possible the creation and the later consolidation of an extended psychiatry, which still today seems to be obsessed about classifying the most varied behaviors as pathologies. The theory of degeneration creates a very wide explanatory frame for mental illness, in which the clear distinction between alienation and minor degenerations disappears and both are understood as physical or moral detours of an original type. From this time on, psychiatry transcends the walls of the asylum, to devote itself to the complete management of the social space.