The Essex Lectures in Philosophy: Professor Fabian Freyenhagen Lecture 1

The Essex Lectures in Philosophy are held each year. In July 2025 the lectures are titled, ‘Our Psychiatric Present: a Foucault-inspired critique’

Our Psychiatric Present: a Foucault-inspired critique

Lecture 1: History of Madness Revisited — reconstructing Foucault’s work on madness and the birth of psychiatry.

What are we to make of a social world in which it has become normal to be diagnosed with a psychiatric condition? How did we get there? And what shall we do about it: shall we welcome the new configuration of normalised pathology or seek to extract ourselves from it? In this series of lectures, I will present the preliminary findings of a project in which I deploy Foucault’s critical reflections about the birth of psychiatry (ca. 1790s) to rethink the re-birth of psychiatry post-1980 and the wider social world shaped by (and shaping) this rebirth. 

Bio: Fabian Freyenhagen is Professor of Philosophy. He read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, and then completed a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. His earlier research concentrated on a philosophical defence of early Frankfurt School Critical Theory – notably in his monograph Adorno’s Practical Philosophy (CUP 2013). It also included interdisciplinary work at the intersection of psychiatry, philosophy, and law. His more recent research explores the idea of social pathology (i.e., the idea that society can be ill, not just make us ill). This connects to a wider research initiative, the Centre for Investigating Contemporary Social Ills (CICSI), which currently focuses on mental distress and its social context. Bringing together academics from different subject areas with practitioners and activists, we are critically investigating our psychiatric present. 

Each lecture is one hour, followed by approx one hour discussion.

Please register on Eventbrite for your free ticket.