How and why did mentally ill people become subjects of imagery? Since the late 19th century, doctors have photographed their patients behind the walls of institutions. Medical professionals attempted to make the invisible life of the soul visible through the medium of photography by identifying it with fixable bodily symptoms. This book interprets the "photographs against their will" as part of a normative body politics that defined the foreign and thus created a counter-world to the representative bourgeois normality. "Visual violence" is a keyword for a regulatory process that targeted bodies and souls in the name of scientific reason, typified people, and excluded them. Popular representations of madness are still influenced by this today.