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Academy
for the Study of the
Psychoanalytic Arts
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A
Foucauldian Analysis of Psychoanalysis: A Discipline that
"Disciplines" by
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg My point is not that everything is bad, but
that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same a bad. If
everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position
leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that
the ethico-political choice we have to make very day is to determine which is
the main danger. (Michel Foucault) 1 One of the ethico-political choices of the
later Foucault was to focus on the danger represented by psychoanalysis in our
developing disciplinary society. Tendentially, such a society, for
Foucault, would be "a regulated, anatomical, hierarchized society whose
time is carefully distributed, its spaces partitioned, characterized by
obedience and surveillance." If we refer to a developing disciplinary
society, it is because, for Foucault, these tendencies encounter resistance, not
all the trends and practices of our society are disciplinary, and, therefore,
the very powerful disciplinary tendencies which characterize modernity do not
constitute a totalization. According to Foucault, "'Discipline' may be
identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of
power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments,
techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an
'anatomy' of power, a technology." That developing disciplinary
society, in which we moderns find ourselves, has as one of its key feature a
political technology of individuals in which the repression and domination of
people through the violence, or direct threat of violence, by the monarch or
ruler has been largely replaced by the control of people through disciplinary
technologies and the disciplines, These latter, the human science, of which
psychoanalysis is one, make it possible to discipline the human subjects to
whose very creation they have been integral. As C. G. Prado has pointed
out, central to Foucault's account of modernity is: ... what he calls
"disciplines" or what can be glossed as techniques for managing
people. His point is that disciplinary or managerial techniques were initiated
and developed into a technology for the control of individuals. The new
techniques continued to operate on the body, as had monarchical torture, but
they did so by imposing schedules, restrictions, obligatory comportment, and
examinations. In contrast to their brutal predecessors, the new techniques did
not inflict violence on the body. Instead of inflicting pain, the new techniques
instilled controlling habits and value-sustaining self-images. If psychoanalysis loomed large in
Foucault's concerns about the developing disciplinary society, it was because it
was one of the disciplines which has had a decisive role in constituting the
modern subject, which has shaped its very deployment and the mode in which it is
disciplined. According to Louis Sass, "psychoanalysis is by far the
most influential contemporary vision of human nature...." It shapes the way
in which we today understand the personal domain (self, self-identity and
subjectivity) as well as the relation between self-organization and the
contemporary social and political worlds. Moreover, the knowledge
proffered by psychoanalysis presupposes the person of desire, whose essential
truth lies in her sexuality, and which is revealed through a confession, a
verbalization, brought within the confines of a rigorous scientificity. In
addition, as Francoise Meltzer has argued, "Psychoanalysis has infiltrated
such diverse areas as literature (to which it owes its myths), linguistics,
philosophy, anthropology, history, feminism, psychology, archeology, neurology,
to name some. And it is in the notion of 'some,' perhaps, that lies the crux of
the problem. For there is in psychoanalysis an overt conviction that it exists
as the ultimate totality, of which everything else is a part." Beyond
the vast scope of its theoretical claims, psychoanalysis also shapes the
therapies which are deployed by the health professions: a s Eli Zaretsky has
pointed out, "... all forms of psychotherapy, other than drugs or
behavioral modification, are based on some variation of psychoanalysis. Finally,
the modern subject, in the deployment of which, and in whose therapeutic
treatment, psychoanalysis has played so important a role, has itself assumed an
unexamined, taken-for-granted character; its truth is taken to be universal, and
as such, it is rarely questioned. Foucault's concerns about psychoanalysis
were linked to his overall concern to alert us to the dangers involved in that
which is taken to be self-evident, universal, and necessary. Action based
on the unexamined, taken-for-granted, assumptions implicit in our practices and
thinking can have painful consequences. For, as William E. Connolly has
pointed out, Foucault believed that it was the "arbitrary cruelty installed
in regular institutional arrangements taken to embody the Law, the Good,
or the Thus, for example, many psychoanalysts in
the 1950's and 1960', including such prominent figures as Irving Bieber, Lionel
Ovesy, and Charles Socarides, designated homosexuality as necessarily
pathological, and viewed the adoption of heterosexual behavior to be a valid and
important goal of treatment. Their scientifically based assumption of a supposed
normal pattern of sexual development, according to Nikolas Rose, simultaneously
defined a state that was presumed to be healthy at the level of the individual,
desirable at the social level, and normal at the statistical level. Confronted
by such normative claims, many homosexuals were trapped by a rhetoric of
pathologization and rejection, causing great personal anguish. That
anguish was compounded by the fact that the homosexual confronted a series of
claims and assertions that were supposedly scientifically grounded, and,
thereby, seemingly unchallengeable. As David Halperin has pointed out: To be, and to find oneself being, known and
described--rationally (or so it can be made to seem) and therefore definitively,
more objectively (or so one is told) than one is capable of describing oneself
and therefore irrefutably, resistlessly, and with an instantaneous finality that
preempts and defeats any attempt on one's own part to intervene in the process
by which one becomes an object of knowledge, and that renders one helpless to
stave off the effects of a knowledge one has had no share in creating -- that is
an experience whose peculiar terror is hard to convey to those who have never
suffered from the social liabilities that cause the rest of us to be continually
and endlessly prey to it. Foucault's concerns about the
"arbitrary cruelty" imposed by the institutions of the developing
disciplinary society which act as the arbiter of the " As a result of these discursive and medical
practices which are embedded within the developing disciplinary society, in
Rose's words, "The human individual has become calculable and
manageable." However, what of those children whose behavior has been
designated as abnormal or pathological, and whose management requires
therapeutic "correction"? Such children may face exclusion and
segregation from their peers, be classified as deviants, and become the objects
of invasive therapeutic and medical technologies. Given the suffering that is
inflicted on children designated as abnormal, children who do not conform to our
management-driven behavioral norms, we should make a thorough inquiry both into
the social and discursive practices on the basis of which those norms were
created, and into the assumptions underlying the very institutions and
professional expertise that empower us to engage in the classifying and dividing
practices of psychoanalysis. William Connolly has pointed out that
Foucault contended "that systematic cruelty flows regularly from the
thoughtlessness of aggressive conventionality, the transcendentalization of
contingent identities, and the treatment of good/evil as a duality wired into
the intrinsic order of things." It is through "disrupting" our
present practices and prevailing categories of thought, showing that they were
historically created and contingent, not self-evident and necessary, that
Foucault hoped to foster the critical distance needed to see the dangers
inherent in them. For Foucault, "A critique is not a matter of saying that
things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds
of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of
thought the practices that we accept rest." Moreover, for Foucault, the
work of the critical intellectual is "to question over and over again what
is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people's mental habits, to dissipate
what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions...." Only after showing that things are not
self-evident or necessary is the conceptual space opened up that will provide
the opportunity to exercise the freedom to "think differently" and act
otherwise. Thinking differently for Foucault, as C. G. Prado has asserted,
entails the "ceaseless problematization of established truths and
knowledges" which will "enable us to resist being wholly determined by
power-relations." By modifying the truths and knowledges within which we
are fashioned, and in terms of which we fashion ourselves, as subjects, we can
resist the dominant forms of power-relations instantiated in the developing
disciplinary society. Indeed, thinking differently means not just disrupting
taken-for-granted modes of thinking, but experiencing the world in new ways, and
acting in it on the basis of a new perspective. Thus, thinking differently,
critique, for Foucault, is genealogical, not metaphysical. Foucauldian critique
is not directed to the quest for any transcendental bases of human thought or
action, but rather to separating "out, from the contingency that has made
us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we
are, do, or think. It is not seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has
finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as
possible, to the undefined work of freedom." Foucault's conception of the critical
intellectual who opens up the space to think differently is linked to his
perspectivism, his experiential notion of truth, and to his conception of his
own works as "fictions." For Foucault, truth is not a linguistic
correspondence with reality, with the "facts." As a Nietzschean, for
Foucault, there is no reality "in itself," no facts, to which truth
would correspond, or, at any rate, no way to ground such a conception of truth.
Instead there are only interpretations, and truth is perspectival and
experiential; "Truth is not of the order of that which is, but of that
which happens, an event. It is not recorded, but created [suscitée]: something
produced, not apophantic." Foucault's perspectivism, his contention that
his own conclusions and judgements are interpretations, what Hubert Dreyfus and
Paul Rabinow have designated his "interpretive analytics," means that
his diagnosis of modernity as a developing disciplinary society cannot itself be
grounded; there is nothing outside the analysis or interpretation itself on
which to ground it. As Dreyfus and Rabinow contend, Foucault's "diagnosis
that the increasing organization of everything is the central issue of our time
is not in any way empirically demonstrable, but rather emerges as an
interpretation. This interpretation grows out of pragmatic concerns and has
pragmatic intent, and for that very reason can be contested by other
interpretations growing out of other concerns." Foucault's perspectivism,
his commitment to the radical contingency of interpretation, is an extremely
novel idea, the implications of which have not always been recognized. This idea that truth is not apophantic,
corresponding to something "out there," something "real," is
connected to Foucault's claim to write experience-books, to acknowledge that his
interpretations "'are nothing but fictions.'" According to Dreyfus and
Rabinow, these fictions can be extremely important, though in ways that reveal
"more about society and its practices than about ultimate reality.
Interpretation starts from current society and its problems. It gives them
a genealogical history, without claiming to capture what the past really
was." However, Foucault's fictions, through which he creates the space to
think differently, which are an exercise of freedom, are not to be understood as
"false" over against statements which are true. Rather, these fictions
can become true to the extent to which they are taken up and used to comprehend,
and act in, the world. That is, these fictions become true as we think with
them, and act in the world on the basis of them. This is close to what C. G.
Prado understands by Richard Dawkin's notion of "catching on," or to
Richard Rorty's conception of "uptake." The constant danger is that
these fictions, once they catch on, once they become truths, will end up as
ahistorical, transcendental, concepts. It is for this reason that Foucault
speaks of a permanent critique of ourselves, and of our historical epoch, which
applies not just to the truths established by the prevailing discursive
practices, but to the fictions which we want to catch on as well. In that sense,
Foucault's injunction to constantly disrupt people's mental habits will also
apply to his own fictions should they achieve the status of successful cultural
artifacts. Such then is Foucault's "hyper- and pessimistic activism":
the critical intellectual seeks to resist the power-relations inscribed in the
prevailing social and discursive practices, seeks to overcome the dangers which
they instantiate. And it is this hyper- and pessimistic activism which Foucault
directs to an encounter with psychoanalysis. Before turning to the several different
elements of a Foucauldian critique of psychoanalysis, we need to insist that
Foucault's very understanding of psychoanalysis arises within the perspective of
his confrontation with the developing disciplinary society, and to stress the
fact that psychoanalysis itself is a contested term, one without any fixed
meaning. Thus, psychoanalysis signifies very different things, depending on the
time and place in its history. Moreover, the very criteria on the basis of which
one defines psychoanalysis, and who is qualified to be considered an analyst,
will differ greatly depending where one is situated historically, culturally,
and linguistically. Psychoanalysis can be best understood as a
"floating signifier," as a term that is itself historically contingent
and variable. It is therefore important to indicate what Foucault means when he
uses the term. Psychoanalysis, for Foucault, does not simply refer to
psychotherapy or theory as it is conventionally understood. Rather,
refunctioning a concept that Mitchell Dean has utilized in a different context,
we can see psychoanalysis as an "assemblage," "comprised of
diverse and heterogeneous elements: modes of training; forms of expertise;
systems of classification; administrative practices and principles ... theories,
strategies, and programmes of governance, their targets, aims, ideals, and
effects; and agents and authorities." Moreover, this assemblage which
comprises psychoanalysis is but one manifestation of the developing disciplinary
society that so troubled Foucault, and whose genealogy was a focus of his work.
As Dreyfus and Rabinow contend, Foucault "isolates and identifies the
pervasive organization of our society as `bio-technico-power.' Bio-power is the
increasing ordering of all realms under the guise of improving the welfare of
the individual and the population. To the genealogist this order reveals itself
to be a strategy, with no one directing it and everyone increasingly enmeshed in
it, whose only end is the increase of power and order itself." Psychoanalysis is the term by which we
designate one of the disciplines among the psychological and social sciences, a
discipline that includes a taken-for-granted understanding of the human subject
and a therapeutic technology for its management. The assemblage that comprises
psychoanalysis as a discipline entails a particular discourse on human
existence, a life-and identity-defining master narrative which articulates a
specific form of the subject that is asserted to be natural, essential,
ahistorical, and universal; a subject constituted by its sexual desire. As Jana
Sawicki has pointed out, according to Foucault, psychoanalysis "operates by
categorizing individuals and attaching them to their identities, a form of power
that locates the truth of the individual in his or her sexuality." It is
within the framework of the psychoanalytic understanding that the truth of the
individual lies in one's sexuality, that Foucault will explore the profound
implications of what has been termed the "repressive hypothesis." Indeed, one of the leitmotivs of Foucault's
treatment of psychoanalysis as a manifestation of the developing disciplinary
society is his thoroughgoing critique of the repressive hypothesis. In the
broadest sense the repressive hypothesis, which is integral to the master
narrative of psychoanalysis, and to the liberatory schemas of Wilhelm Reich and
Herbert Marcuse, which are based on the existence of the Freudian desiring
subject, insists that in the West, until the beginning of the seventeenth
century, men engaged in "both a non-repressed sexual practice, an open and
above-board sexual practice, and a free and joyful prattle, a kind of discourse
free of reticence and disguises, about this sexuality." By the nineteenth
century, the Victorian night had descended, and, according to the repressive
hypothesis, sexuality, its practice, and its discourse, had been repressed,
silenced. In his histories, Foucault has shown that the nineteenth century
actually saw a preoccupation with sexuality and its manifold forms, an
overwhelming concern with sexuality on the part of the biological and medical
disciplines. What concerned Foucault, then, was the deployment of sexuality, and
the forms this deployment has taken in modernity. As he contended: "It's
not a question of denying sexual misery, but it's also not a question of
explaining it negatively by repression. The whole problem is to understand which
are the positive mechanisms that, producing sexuality in such a fashion, result
in misery." For Foucault, the repressive hypothesis
itself arose with the modern deployment of sexuality. Propelled by the theories
of Reich and Marcuse, the repressive hypothesis, which rested on an ahistorical
conception of the human essence, and its sexuality, one it shared with Freudian
psychoanalysis, has become the dominant political form in which the claims for
sexual liberation have been articulated. However, Foucault argues that, taken up
by sexologists and by anti-repressive therapists, these very claims constitute a
trap for us: They basically tell us: 'You have a
sexuality, this sexuality is both frustrated and mute, hypocritical prohibitions
repress it. So, come to us, show us, confide in us your unhappy secrets...' This
type of discourse is in fact a formidable tool of control and power. As always,
it uses what people say, feel and hope for. It exploits their temptation to
believe that to be happy, it suffices to cross the threshold of discourse and
remove a few prohibitions. It ends up in fact repressing and controlling
movements of revolt and liberation 34. For Foucault, there is a distinction
between repression, and the sexual misery it brings, and the repressive
hypotheses, which rests on the belief in our invariant sexual essence, and needs
to be grasped within the framework of a particular deployment of sexuality. Commentators on Foucault often have largely
focused on that part of his critique of the repressive hypothesis which shows
that the nineteenth century actually saw a veritable explosion of discourses on
sexuality, if not in literature (though if one includes pornography, there too),
then surely in the biological and medical domain. However, to us what seems most
significant in Foucault's critique of the repressive hypothesis is his
contention that sexuality was actually deployed by the disciplines, which is why
there was an explosion of discourses on sexuality in the Victorian Age, and that
sexuality was part of a strategy of control, integral to the spread of
bio-power. According to Foucault, sexuality "appears... as an especially
dense transfer point for relations of power" articulated through a web of
scientific and medical discourses and practices operating on the body. These
latter constituted the particular deployment of sexuality that was connected to
the exercise of bio-power. As Foucault argued: Sexuality must not be described as a
stubborn drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to a power which
exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails to control it entirely. ....
Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one
of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest
number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as a lynchpin,
for the most varied strategies. Indeed, as David Halperin has insisted, in
contrast to the claims of psychoanalysis and its repressive hypothesis,
sexuality "...is not some biological or physiological reality but an
unprecedented historical `apparatus' (dispositif) for the organization of
subjectivities, social relations, and knowledges...." What Foucault most
objected to in the repressive hypothesis, then, was its somatization and
transcendentalization of sexuality, and the desiring subject. Where
psychoanalysis claimed to reveal the person of desire, Foucault argued that it
had created him; where psychoanalysis claimed to uncover sexuality as the
veritable key to our human nature, Foucault asserted that it had played the
major role in its deployment. For psychoanalysis, the discovery of the
truth about one's sexuality is liberating, and, therefore, constitutes one of
the primary goals of its therapeutic technologies. These therapeutic
technologies, in which the patient is enjoined to speak the truth about his or
her sexuality, according to Foucault, are linked to the confessional practices
of ancient and medieval Christianity. For Foucault, both Christian
confession and psychoanalysis enjoin one to speak, to reveal, to disclose, in
the former to a priest, in the latter to the analyst. Verbalization is the basis
of both. What psychoanalysis, and its scientia sexualis has wrought is a
veritable transformation of confessional practices, which has "caused the
rituals of confession to function within the norms of scientific
regularity...." For Foucault, one of the main dangers of
psychoanalysis was precisely its claim to know and reveal the Truth of the human
subject; its denial of the historicity and variability of the modes of human
subjectification. As John Rajchman has opined, hasn't the purportedly
revolutionary idea of psychoanalysis, that we are persons of desire, only
continued "a confessional tradition, a jeu de verite of a time and place
that had made it possible to say only one sort of truth about ourselves: the
truth concerning our desire?" The claim that there is an invariant human
subject, the essence of which is revealed by psychoanalysis and its theoretical
matrix, facilitates the constitution of norms of behavior which can be fashioned
on the foundation of its purportedly scientific knowledge. Therein lies the
basis for the various disciplinary technologies which are deployed in the
developing disciplinary society. It is against the backdrop of precisely that
danger that Foucault undertakes his confrontation with psychoanalysis. For James
Bernauer: The significance and form of Foucault's
history of the man of desire are best grasped if the history is understood in
the context of its contribution to his "archaeology of
psychoanalysis"; the objective of this latter project was to undermine
modern anthropology and the notion of the self that was one of its firmest
supports and expressions. Freud's understanding is a model of this notion, and
thus becomes the principal target of Foucault's effort to render the self
freshly problematic. The failure to recognize the confrontation with Freud that
is taking place in Foucault's last works has often prevented commentators from
appreciating his intentions and organization in these writings....40 For Foucault, what links the various
psychoanalytic technologies is that they all provide procedures for making the
self calculable, manageable, and governable along a set of fixed coordinates.
According to Hubert Dreyfus, each of these technologies emanate from theories
which "make causal claims based on an alleged science of human nature which
justifies an account of normal and abnormal psychological function." Each
of them postulates a subject, the features of which are fixed and unchangeable.
Thus, the Freudian and Kleinian versions of psychoanalysis insist that the truth
about our human nature is lodged in our sexuality, a vision which they share
with the anti-repressive hypotheses of Reich and Marcuse. As Dreyfus points out,
even the currently very influential Lacanian version of Freudianism
"assumes an ahistorical knowledge of human nature...." For John
Rajchman, it was just that claim on the part of Lacan which provoked Foucault's
questioning: "Did we really have to place at the heart of our eros a
'signifying chain' that would always be leading back to an impasse or failing in
our desire, and forward to the intricate role this desire would keep having in
our lives? Or was this not just the presumption of a specific practice of
interpretation, a particular 'hermeneutic of the self'?" Similarly,
object-relations theory, one of the most important versions of psychoanalysis is
the United States today, assumes that there is a fundamental human striving to
relate to others, and that, according to Ronald Fairbairn, the libido is
inherently object-seeking, not pleasure-seeking. Perhaps most important,
object-relations theory posits algorithms of interaction which work by making
human relations calculable. Meanwhile, self-psychology postulates that the human
infant arrives in the world with an innate, biological, need for attachment,
which therapy seeks to facilitate by developing the analysand's capacity to find
an empathetically responsive selfobject milieu. In Foucault's view, by contrast, the
subject does not only have a genealogy, a history, but histories,
inasmuch as there are manifold historical forms of subjectification and
possibilities for new forms of subjectification in the future. As John
Rajchman insists, "Foucault took it upon himself to show that the question
of 'desire' introduced through the Freudian 'revolution in ethics' was not
universal, but rather `historical' -- a singular and contingent invention we may
in fact be able to do without." In contrast to the psychoanalytic
conception of a transcendental subject, the later Foucault argued that
"there is no sovereign, constitutive, subject, a universal form of the
subject that one can find everywhere." Instead, the subject is a
historically contingent and changeable cultural identity. Moreover, the
Freudian subject, the person of desire, the subject whom psychoanalysis has
claimed to scientifically discover and reveal, is, therefore, a cultural
construction; indeed, an identity constructed by psychoanalysis itself as a
discipline. According to Gary Gutting, Foucault is especially concerned to
challenge the claims of the human sciences "to provide knowledge of human
beings. This is because he sees these disciplines ... as the primary source of
contemporary constraints on human freedom." These constraints arise from
the claims of the human sciences, and psychoanalysis in particular, to reveal
the norms on the basis of which the healthy subject must function. The claims to
scientificity on the part of these disciplines rest, in Foucault's view, on the
fact that it invests them with enormous power, "a power which the West
since medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those
engaged in scientific discourse." 47 Beyond its claims for the ahistorical
character of the subject, and the power its purported scientificity lends it,
Foucault was also concerned to establish the genealogy of psychoanalysis as a
discipline. According to John Towes, "Foucault perceived psychoanalytic
therapeutic practice and its scientific discourse as a complex formation that
stood at the crossroads where most of the important genealogies of the modern
subject met and interacted. It also functioned as a kind of epitome of
structural similarities in the techniques and discourses that produced the
modern sexual subject as well as of an unreflective scientific perspective that
denied the historicity of its knowledge." Thus, Foucault called our
attention not just to the inability of psychoanalysis to acknowledge the
historicity of the subject, and its own role in the genealogy of the person of
desire, but also, and perhaps especially, to its failure to address the
genealogy of its own all encompassing truth claims. For Foucault, the very genesis of the
discipline of psychoanalysis is itself linked to historical changes in the
exercise of power-relations, and in particular to the emergence of
governmentality. According to the later Foucault, modern power-relations
cannot be grasped on the basis of political theory's traditional model of
power-law-sovereignty-repression. This juridical model of power, which still
dominates political theory, and sees power as emanating from a sovereign, from
the top down, ignores the fact that power today also comes from below. As Leslie
Paul Thiele has argued in his explication of Foucault's contribution to a theory
of power: "Power forms an omnipresent web of relations, and the individuals
who support this web are as much the producers and transmitters of power as they
are its objects." In place of the juridical model of power, Foucault
argues that modern power-relations are instantiated through what he designates
as "governmentality." For Foucault: The exercise of power consists in guiding
the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome.
Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking
of one to the other than a question of government. This word must be
allowed the very broad meaning which it had in the sixteenth century.
`Government' did not refer only to political structures or to the management of
states; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or
groups might be directed: the government of children, of souls, of communities,
of families, of the sick. .... To govern, in this sense, is to structure the
possible field of action of others. For Foucault, then, the operations of the
modern state are not restricted to interdiction or repression in the political
sense, but have expanded to incorporate the practices of governmentality.
Government, in the Foucauldian sense, depends on the knowledge generated by the
human sciences, by the disciplines, in particular psychoanalysis; indeed, the
state claims that it governs on the basis of that knowledge. Here, the
central role of the human sciences in the operation of the developing
disciplinary society, and its techniques for the control and management of its
citizens becomes especially clear. Moreover, governmentality, and the
technologies for the control of individuals, are by no means limited to the
state. Indeed, according to Nikolas Rose and Peter
Miller, modern, liberal societies do not leave the regulation of conduct solely
or even primarily to the operations of the state and its bureaucracies:
"Liberal government identifies a domain outside 'politics,' and seeks to
manage it without destroying its existence and its autonomy." This is
accomplished through the activities of a host of institutions and agents not
formally part of the state apparatus, including psychoanalytic facilities and
analysts. As Nikolas Rose has pointed out, psychoanalysis, like "All the
sciences which have the prefix `psy-' or `psycho-' have their roots in this
shift in the relationship between social power and the human body, in which
regulatory systems have sought to codify, calculate, supervise, and maximize the
level of functioning of individuals. The `psy sciences' were born within a
project of government of the human soul and the construction of the person as a
manageable subject." As a manifestation of governmentality and
its power-relations, psychoanalysis is implicated in the control of the
individual. For Foucault, psychoanalysis is a discipline that
"disciplines," that helps to create politically and economically
socialized, useful, cooperative, and -- as one of the hallmarks of bio-power --
docile individuals. Indeed, according to John Forrester, for Foucault,
psychoanalysis is "the purest version of the social practices that exercise
domination in and through discourse, whose power lies in words, whose words can
never by anything other than instruments of power." Of course, the aim of
the analyst is not control, but the "mental health" of the individual
and the "betterment" of society. Nonetheless, the result of the
psychoanalytic management-oriented conception of the subject is an individual
who is susceptible to techno-medical control. Moreover, as Nikolas Rose has
suggested, the power-knowledge obtained by psychoanalysis (and indeed all of the
psy sciences) and its technologies for the control of the individual: fed back into social life at a number of
levels. Individuals could be classified and distributed to particular
social locations in the light of them -- in schools, jobs, ranks in the army,
types of reformatory institutions, and so forth. Further, in consequence,
new means emerged for the codification and analysis of the consequences of
organizing classrooms, barracks, prisons, production lines, the family, and
social life itself....Hence, the psy knowleges could feed back into more general
economic and social programs, throwing up new problems and opportunities for
attempts to maximize the use of the human resources of the nation and to
increase its levels of personal health and well-being. Whatever its impact or health and welfare,
this power-knowledge enhanced the degree of control to which the person was
subject, and made it possible to effectively discipline the individual. Indeed,
the existence of our developing disciplinary society is inconceivable without
the psy sciences, and the power-relations which they consolidate. The discipline and control of the
individual to which psychoanalysis made its signal contribution, was linked to
its conception of, and commitment to, normalization. Foucault signalled the
increasing role of normality and normalization in the functioning of the
developing disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish: "The judges of
normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge,
the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the `social worker'-judge; it is on them
that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual,
wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his
behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements." For Foucault, discipline
and normalization were inseparable components of the emergence of the human
sciences, and their technologies. Indeed, he asserted that "a
normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered
on life." Psychoanalysis did not break with this
complex. Indeed, according to Foucault, "Freud was well aware of all this.
He was aware of the superior strength of his position on the matter of
normalization." Indeed, psychoanalysis was thoroughly implicated in the
societal process in which the norm increasingly supplanted the law, in which the
West was "becoming a society which is essentially defined by the
norm." For Foucault: "The norm becomes the criterion for
evaluating individuals. As it truly becomes a society of the norm,
medicine, par excellence the science of the normal and the pathological, assumes
the status of a royal science." Lest one conclude that Foucault is
not referring to psychoanalysis here, he is quick to point out that
"psychoanalysis, not only in the United States, but also in France,
functions massively as a medical practice: even if it is not always practiced by
doctors, it certainly functions as therapy, as a medical type of intervention.
From this point of view, it is very much a part of this network of medical
'control' which is being established all over." Deviation from the norm, in
the establishment of which psychoanalysis played a signal role, the anomaly,
became the object of the technologies and therapeutic techniques of the psy
sciences, psychoanalysis among them. The theological conception of evil had
given way to the psychoanalytic conception of deviance, in the combat against
which the analyst was now enlisted to play a leading role. As Hubert
Dreyfus has claimed, "Freudian theory thus reinforces the collective
practices that allow norms based on alleged sciences of human nature to permeate
every aspect of our lives." These practices then become a lynchpin of
the developing disciplinary society and its techniques for managing people. If Foucault situates psychoanalysis within
the orbit of a developing normalizing disciplinary society of control, a
governmentalized society, his genealogy of psychoanalysis scrupulously avoided
any essentialization of that discipline, any judgement as to its intrinsic
danger. Indeed, based upon his interpretive analytics, his perspectivism,
Foucault's understanding of psychoanalysis could only be an interpretation.
As Jana Sawicki has contended: From a Foucauldian perspective, no
discourse is inherently liberating or oppressive. This includes psychoanalytic
discourses. .... we can only conclude that for Foucault, the status of
psychoanalytic theory is ambiguous, a matter that must be judged by looking at
specific instances, and not by setting up general criteria. No doubt this
is the point Foucault was making in one of his last interviews when he said: 'My
point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.' 62 Given Foucault's understanding of
genealogy, and his opposition to any totalization, that unwillingness to set up
general criteria, or to designate a discourse as inherently oppressive, is only
to be expected. Thus, in the course of his genealogical
study of psychoanalysis, Foucault showed how "Psychoanalysis was
established in opposition to a certain kind of psychiatry, the psychiatry of
degeneracy, eugenics and heredity." As Dreyfus and Rabinow show,
"Foucault points out that particularly in its early days, whatever its
normalizing function later on, psychoanalysis demonstrated a persistent and
courageous resistance to all theories of hereditary degeneracy." In
breaking the link between pathology and heredity, in asserting that the division
between the normal and the abnormal was not biological, and that it ran through
each individual, in its conception of the unconscious, which challenged the
claim of consciousness to be the essence of our human being, psychoanalysis had
a liberating role to play at its inception. In his analysis of the origins
of psychoanalysis in The Order of Things, Foucault found much to appreciate in
the revolutionary achievements of Freud. Much of the contrast between that
understanding of psychoanalysis and the very different conclusions reached by
the later Foucault, pertains to the historical context in which psychoanalysis
is situated. In The Order of Things, Foucault was counterposing Freud's
theoretical breakthroughs and their impact to the orthodoxies of nineteenth
century psychiatry. The later Foucault, by contrast, was concerned with the role
of psychoanalysis as a discourse and complex of therapeutic technologies which
had become one of the orthodox pillars of the normalizing disciplinary society. Even in the contemporary world,
socio-political context may still allow psychoanalysis to play a liberating
role. Thus, for Foucault, "in certain countries (I am thinking of
Brazil in particular), it has played a political role, denouncing the complicity
of psychiatrists with political power." The same thing was true in the
Soviet Union, where those who were drawn to psychoanalysis tended to be critical
of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes, in contrast to the psychiatric
profession. Moreover, one can easily imagine that in West African societies
where clitoridectomies are routinely performed, and socially sanctioned,
psychoanalysis and its insistence on the centrality of sexuality to one's
personhood would be progressive in its impact. "But the fact remains that
in our societies the career of psychoanalysis has taken other directions and has
been the object of different investments. Certain of its activities have
effects which fall within the function of control and normalisation." Beyond even its complicity in the control
and normalization of the individual, the incorporation of the assemblage of
psychoanalysis in the dispositif of the developing disciplinary society, the
symmetry of its therapeutic technologies with the expanding sphere of
governmentality, what Foucault saw as so dangerous in psychoanalysis were its
discursive practices -- which it shared with modern humanism -- through which
"a certain idea or model of humanity was developed, and now this idea of
man has become normative, self-evident, and is supposed to be universal. ....
What I am afraid of about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our
ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom." It was the
scientific claim of psychoanalysis to speak the Truth of the human subject that
so frightened and disturbed Michel Foucault. In contrast to that notion of a true self
that is supposed to answer the question "who am I?" with a universal
model of a normalized self, Foucault's idea, according to John Caputo, is
"not only not to answer the question but to see to it that no one else is
allowed to answer it either. He wanted to keep this question open, and
above all to block the administrators and professionals and managers of all
sorts from answering this question, thereby closing us in on some constituted
identity or another that represents a strictly historical, that is, contingent
constraint." Foucault was not interested in attempting to generate a new
normative idea of a self to which individuals should conform. What individuals
should become is not of Foucault's or anyone else's business. As we have
said, what Foucault was attempting to do was to open up spaces, "to give
new impetus ... to the undefined work of freedom." In terms of our present
socio-political context, that means freedom for the individual to invent
herself. This is the link between Foucault's
genealogy of psychoanalysis and his exploration of technologies of the self in
the last two published volumes of his History of Sexuality. Foucault's
interest in the pagan world, and its preoccupation with the "care of the
self," was an integral part of his effort to open up spaces, to allow the
individual to re-invent himself. If psychoanalysis provides us with a
normalized self as universal, a subject based on its sexuality, then Foucault
was convinced "that there are more secrets, more possible freedoms, and
more inventions in our future than we can imagine in humanism as it is
dogmatically represented on every side of the political rainbow...." For
Foucault, the continuous critique of ourselves, of what we have contingently
become, and of our historical epoch, all in the service of an ethic of permanent
resistance against the obstacles to our re-creating ourselves, can unlock those
secrets, and perhaps instantiate those possible freedoms. The preoccupation of the final Foucault
with technologies of the self was the concretization of the project he had
adumbrated on the final page of the first volume of that History of Sexuality:
"we need to consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different
economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer understand how the ruses
of sexuality, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject
us to that austere monarchy of sex, so that we became dedicated to the endless
task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest confession from a
shadow." The final volumes of The History of Sexuality, The Use of
Pleasure, and The Care of the Self, as Joel Black has argued, were about
"an alternative to the modern, scientific, and specifically psychoanalytic
mode of thinking about sexuality," adumbrating an understanding of askesis
which is a regulation of pleasure. Foucault's concept of askesis as the
regulation of pleasure, his linkage of ethics and aesthetics, his commitment to
the task of creating ourselves as a work of art, constitute his answer to the
claims of psychoanalysis, and the danger it constituted as a bulwark of the
developing, normalizing, disciplinary society. As Alexander Nehamas has
persuasively argued, Foucault passionately "believed that the 'care of the
self,' unlike psychoanalysis, was not a process of discovering who one 'truly'
is, but of inventing, improvising, creating who one can be.72" 1. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy
of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress," in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul
Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Second Edition
With an Afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 231-232. 2. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live:
Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, Edited by Sylvere Lotringer (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 189. 3. Peter Miller also seeks to avoid the
risk of totalization, and the danger of failing to see the extent to which
"individuals constantly escape, evade and subvert the functioning of
discipline." He, therefore, distinguishes a "disciplinary
society" from a "disciplined society." See Peter Miller,
Domination and Power (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p.
196 4. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage books, 1979), p. 215. 5. C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An
Introduction to Genealogy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 52. 6. Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 20. 7. Francoise Meltzer, "Introduction:
Partitive Plays, Pipe Dreams," in The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, Edited by
Francoise Meltzer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988),
p. 2. 8. Eli Zaretsky, "Bisexuality,
Capitalism and the Ambivalent Legacy of Psychoanalysis, New Left Review, Number
223, May/June 1997, p. 70. 9. William E. Connolly, "Beyond Good
and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault," Political Theory,
Vol. 21, No. 3, August 1993, p. 366. 10. John Caputo, "On Not Knowing Who
We Are: Madness, Hermeneutics, and the Night of Truth in Foucault," in John
Caputo and Mark Yount (Eds.), Foucault and the Critique of Institutions
(University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993),
p. 250. 11. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault:
Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
p. 123. 12. Nikolas Rose, "Michel Foucault and
the Study of Psychology," PsychCritique, Vol. l, No. 2. 1985, p. 135. 13. See, for example, Kenneth Lewes, The
Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality (London: Quartet, 1989), and
Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995). 14. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault, p.
176. 15. Nikolas Rose, "Calculable Minds
and Manageable Individuals," History Of The Human Science, Vol. l, No. 2,
October 1988, p. 193. 16. Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul
(London: Routledge, 1989), p. 161. 17. Nikolas Rose, "Calculable Minds
and Manageable Individuals," p. 195. 18. William E. Connolly, "Beyond Good
and Evil," p. 366. 19. Michel Foucault, "Practicing
Criticism" in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews
and Other Writings 1977-1984, Edited with an Introduction by Lawrence D.
Kritzman (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), p. 154. 20. Michel Foucault, "The Concern for
Truth" in Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, p. 265. 21. C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault, p.
163. 22. Michel Foucault, "What is
Enlightenment?" in Paul Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 46. 23. Michel Foucault, "La maison des
fous" in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits: 1954-1988, Edited by Daniel
Defert and Francois Ewald, (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994), Vol. II, p. 694. 24. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. xxvi. 25. Ibid. 26. Michel Foucault, "How an
'Experience-Book' is Born" in Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx:
Conversations with Duccio Trombadori (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 33. 27. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 204, our emphasis. 28. C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault,
pp. 131-132. 29. Mitchell Dean, "A genealogy of the
government of poverty," Economy and Society, Vol. 21, No. 3, August 1992,
p. 216. The term "assemblage" has been taken over from Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari. 30. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. xxvi. 31. Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault:
Feminism, Power and the Body (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), p. 41. 32. Michel Foucault, "Schizo-Culture:
Infantile Sexuality" in Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, p. 155. 33. Michel Foucault, "The End of the
Monarchy of Sex" in Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, p. 216. 34. Ibid., p. 217. 35. Michel Foucault, The History of
Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 103. 36. Ibid. 37. David M. Halperin, "Historicizing
the Subject of Desire: Sexual Preferences and Erotic Identities in the Pseudo-Lucianic
Erotes" in Jan Goldstein (Ed.), Foucault and the Writing of History (Oxford
UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1994), p. 2l. 38. Michel Foucault, The History of
Sexuality, Volume I, p. 65. A fuller discussion of the links between Christian
confession and its transformation by psychoanalysis, and the ways in which
"the sexual confession come[s] to be constituted in scientific terms"
(Ibid.) is beyond the scope of the present essay. 39. John Rajchman, Truth and Eros:
Foucault, Lacan, and the Question of Ethics (New York and London: Routledge,
1991), p. 87. 40. James W. Bernauer, Michel Foucault's
Force of Flight: Towards and Ethics for Thought (New Jersey and London:
Humanities Press, 1990), p. 167. 41. Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Foucault's
Critique of Modern Psychiatry," Journal of Modern Medicine, Volume 12,
1987, p. 332. 42. Ibid., p. 321. 43. John Rajchman, Truth and Eros, p. 87. 44. Ibid.,
p. 88. 45. Michel
Foucault, "Une esthetique de l'existence" in Michel Foucault, Dits et
Ecrits: 1954-1988, Vol. IV, p. 733.
While this formulation of Foucault's, with its universalistic, ahistorical,
implication, opens him up to the charge of self-refutation, what seems to us
valid and crucial in Foucault's statement is its Nietzschean rejection of the
claim -- explicit or implicit in psychoanalysis -- that there could be, in the
words of Alexander Nehamas, "a complete theory of interpretation of
anything, a view that accounts for 'all' the facts...." See Alexander
Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1985), p. 64. 46. Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault's
Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
p. 4. 47. Michel Foucault, "Two
Lectures" in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate,
Edited by Michael Kelly (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT
Press, 1994), p. 24. 48. John E. Toews, "Foucault and the
Freudian Subject: Archaeology, Genealogy, and the Historicization of
Psychoanalysis" in Jan Goldstein (Ed.), Foucault and the Writing of
History, p. 128. 49. Leslie Paul Thiele, "Foucault's
Triple Murder and the Modern Development of Power," Canadian Journal of
Political Science, Vol. XIX, No. 2, June 1986, p. 248. While Foucault spoke of
an "analytics" and not a theory of power to distinguish his ideas from
the totalizing claims of traditional political theory, Thiele claims that theory
is always perspectival, and thereby reclaims the term for a genealogical
perspective. 50. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and
Power" in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, p. 221, our emphasis. 51. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller,
"Political power beyond the state: problematics of government,"
British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 43, No. 2, June 1992, p. 180. 52. Nikolas Rose, "Michel Foucault and
the Study of Psychology," p. 134. 53. John Forrester, The Seductions of
Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), p. 308. 54. Nikolas Rose, "Michel Foucault and
the Study of Psychology," p. 136. Ellen Herman has shown the extent to
which psychoanalysis forged a strategic alliance with the American state during
World War Two, applying its technologies to the requirements of foreign and
military policy. See Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political
Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 55. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish,
p. 304. 56. Michel Foucault, The History of
Sexuality,Volume I, p. 144. 57. Michel Foucault, "Body/Power"
in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972-1977, Edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 61. 58. Michel Foucault, "The Social
Extension of the Norm," in Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, p. 197. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., p. 198. 61. Hubert Dreyfus, "Forward to the
California Edition" in Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. xxxviii. 62. Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault,
pp. 54-55. Foucault himself understood that despite his claim that his writings
were fictions, there was a real danger that his work would be seen as an
essentialization of psycho- analysis. Thus, he acknowledged his concern
that the proponents of a psycho- analytic perspective "will take as
'anti-psychoanalysis' something that is only meant to be a genealogy." See
Michel Foucault, "Power Affects the Body" in Michel Foucault, Foucault
Live, p. 212. 63. Michel Foucault, "Body/Power"
in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 60. 64. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel
Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 172. 65. Michel Foucault, "Body/Power"
in Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 60. 66. Ibid., p. 61. A Foucauldian perspective
would have to keep open the possibility that the evolution of the developing
disciplinary society, such as the growth of HMO's in managing health care, and
the efficiency and savings in replacing long-term psychotherapy by drugs, such
as prozac and other powerful psychopharmaceuticals, may again lead
psychoanalysis to function in a liberating fashion, at least in opposition to
those tendencies. 67. Rux Martin, "Truth, Power, Self:
An Interview with Michel Foucault" in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with
Michel Foucault, Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton
(Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), p. 15. 68. John Caputo, "On Not Knowing Who
We Are" in Caputo and Yount (Eds.), Foucault and the Critique of
Institutions, p. 250. 69. Rux Martin, "Truth, Power,
Self" in Technologies of the Self, p. 15. 70. Michel Foucault, The History of
Sexuality, Volume I, p. 159. 71. Joel Black, "Taking the Sex Out of
Sexuality: Foucault's Failed History" in David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen
Miller, and Charles Platter (Eds.), Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical
Antiquity (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 51-52.
In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault designates askesis, or what the ancients
construed as the forms of ethical work, as "an exercise of oneself in the
activity of thought." See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of
the History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 9. 72. Alexander Nehamas, "Subject and Abject," The New Republic, February 15, 1993, p. 34. Alan Milchman teaches in the department of Political Science of Queens College of the City University of New York. He has published on Marxism, modern genocide, Max Weber, Heidegger, Foucault, and postmodernism. He has co-edited Postmodernism and the Holocaust, with Alan Rosenberg (Rodopi, 1998) and Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust, with Alan Rosenberg (Humanities Press, 1996).
Alan Rosenberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queens College of the City University of New York. He has published widely on psychoanalysis, the Holocaust, and the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. Among the books that he has co-edited are Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, with Alan Milchman (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming); Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz: Philosophical Challenges, with James Watson and Detlef B. Linke (Humanity Books); Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition, with Paul Marcus (NYU press, 1998); Healing Their Wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust Survivors and Their Families, with Paul Marcus (Praeger, 1989); and Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time, with Gerald Myers (Temple University Press, 1988).
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