Law and Psyche (LAW536H1S)

The centrality of law in the structuring and regulation of relations between persons is the focus of most, if not all, legal thought and practice. Some might say that, by definition, law is nothing but an ordering of external relations. This course will seek to explore the far less familiar terrain involving the role of law in the structuring and regulation of internal relations within persons. Must law merely presuppose as given the legal personality it regulates? Is law, on the contrary, an essential participant in the formation and preservation of that personality? What is the relation between legal order and psychic order? In what ways do legal order and disorder encounter, produce and sustain psychic order and disorder? In what ways, if any at all, do the analyses of law and psyche complement and enrich each other?  

The course will explore this terrain through detailed analyses of aspects of the Ontario Mental Health Act as a point of entry into mental health law generally.  Topics to be examined may include the concept of consent under mental health law; the distinction between involuntary admission under the law of mental health and incarceration under the criminal law, treatment and punishment, hospitals and prisons; the relation between mental health law and the law of medically assisted death; the rights of persons detained under the law of mental health law and the corresponding duties of detaining authorities towards those detained under the law of mental health. In addition to the Ontario Mental Health Act and related jurisprudence and commentary, materials to be examined may include selected literary (e.g. Kafka), psychoanalytic (e.g. Freud) and/or philosophical texts (e.g. Foucault). No previous expertise required.