ผู้หญิง ความบ้า และจิตเวชในประเทศไทยช่วงทศวรรษ 2500-2520

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the power of modern Thai psychiatric knowledge between 1957-1977, with emphasis on the content related to sex and gender. Additionally, it considers how modern psychiatric knowledge had invented and shaped women's self, as well as how these notions generally related to knowledge of Thai society in the “development era”. Along the processes, psy knowledge related itself to the minds of Thai individuals; i.e., psychological knowledge was connected to Thai people's sense of self as it progressed. Findings demonstrate that, on the one hand, modern psychiatric knowledge that had developed after the 1950s operated by stigmatizing and suppressing women as the most physically and mentally vulnerable. By equating the female reproductive system with psychological problems of women, the "uterus" came to represent the pathology of a woman's mind. Additionally, women were continually medicalized through psychoanalysis theory. In this way, psychological science organized and explained the sexual behavior of women, and this was how the distinction between normal and abnormal women was also brought into play. On the other hand, modern Thai psychiatry also aimed to develop a woman's sense of self within a new set of social interactions, such as those between men and women, husbands and wives, mothers and children, boys and girls, etc. Like an endless spider web, these connections were intertwined. Between 1957 and 1977, women took on a significant role in the mental health field. According to experts, women's mental health had an impact on the nation's and its inhabitants' mental health. As a result, women were seen as having duties and obligations relating to the development and care of Thai citizens' mental health. In this case, the power of psy knowledge did not only suppress women sexually, it also worked, as a positive knowledge, to construct new images and selves of women to fit within the coordinates of the development-era society. Therefore, it is a subtle kind of power operating even while instilling a sense of pride in Thai women.