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Abstract
In this paper, I examine the relationship between Foucault and psychoanalysis through the lens of problematization. Rather than asking the interpretive question of what was Foucault’s own attitude toward psychoanalysis, I analyze what sort of problem psychoanalysis might be thought to pose for a Foucaultian conception of critique. The bulk of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the three primary dangers that psychoanalysis is typically thought to pose for such a conception; these dangers are grouped under the headings of normalization, the drives, and power. After arguing that these three dangers can be overcome – by which I mean that they do not amount to reasons for believing that psychoanalysis is conceptually incompatible with Foucaultian critique – I then turn to a discussion of how psychoanalytic concepts and categories are related to Foucault’s method of critical problematization. There I argue that psychoanalysis, far from being incompatible with Foucault’s understanding of critique, actually serves as a model for his own critical method understood as a radical approach to writing history.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For a powerful and influential version of this interpretation, see Derrida, “‘To Do Justice to Freud.’”
2 For a related assessment, see Lobb 228.
3 Allow me to emphasize that my primary interest is not the interpretive or hermeneutical question of how best to characterize Foucault’s own position vis-à-vis psychoanalysis. Rather, I aim to pursue the more conceptual and systematic question of whether and how certain fundamental Foucaultian critical, theoretical, and methodological commitments are compatible with core psychoanalytic ideas and concepts. As I hope will become clear in what follows, I don’t think that there is any internal contradiction or conceptual incoherence involved in drawing on both Foucault and psychoanalysis for the project of critique, but, in my experience at least, this is a rather commonly held view, among philosophers, critical social theorists, and even some Foucaultians.
4 Given my aims in this paper, I won’t be delving into detailed discussions of particular psychoanalytic theorists, but I am well aware of the fact that “psychoanalysis” is not a unified theoretical position. I readily acknowledge that there is a vigorous debate amongst psychoanalytic theorists over what assumptions and commitments count as “core” to the discipline. For my purposes, the two psychoanalytic concepts that are most central are the dynamic unconscious and the duality of libidinal and death drives. Thus, although I can’t undertake this project here, the conception of psychoanalysis that is operative here is one that could be reconstructed through a reading of the late Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacques Lacan.
5 On this point, see also “Confession of the Flesh” 211–13.
6 Derrida’s “To Do Justice to Freud” reading of Foucault’s relationship to psychoanalysis famously takes this passage as its jumping-off point.
7 For a compelling argument to this effect, see Huffer (Mad for Foucault ch. 3).
8 For an interesting discussion of Lacan in relation to conservatism, see Badiou and Roudinesco 24–28.
9 Badiou makes a similar point with respect to Lacan: viewed from the point of view of his theory of the Symbolic as the Law of the Father, he is conservative, but read from the point of view of his account of the real and of refusing to give ground on one’s desire, his work is emancipatory. See Badiou and Roudinesco 26–27.
10 See Foucault et al. 213. For helpful discussion of this point, see Grace.
11 In a similar vein, Foucault speaks of the “always-incomplete character of the regressive and analytic process in Freud” as central to the essential, structural incompleteness of psychoanalytic interpretation (“Nietzsche” 274).
12 For his trenchant, even polemical, critique of Lacan, see Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia.
13 Countertransference is not developed systematically in Freud’s own work. Indeed, Lacan famously took Freud to task for failing to see how countertransference was operative in Freud’s failed analysis of Dora (Lacan, “Intervention on Transference”), and Freud later wrote of countertransference solely as an obstacle to be overcome (“Future Prospects” 144–45). Although his later papers on analytic technique complicate this picture somewhat (see especially “Observations”), the topic does not receive systematic treatment until post-Freudian psychoanalysis. For an overview, see Abend.
14 Whitebook criticizes Foucault for not taking countertransference seriously; in Foucault’s defense, although the discussions of countertransference began in the 1950s, they only gained prominence later in the twentieth century, long after he wrote the History of Madness. For an interesting discussion of transference in Foucault’s work, see “Nietzsche” 274–75.
15 For helpful discussion of this point in Lacan, see Ruti, Ethics of Opting Out 69.
16 For related arguments with respect to the Lacanian conception of drive, see Grace; Huffer, “Freudo-Foucauldian Politics.”
17 For a discussion of the importance of this idea in Freud’s conception of human nature, see Whitebook (Freud ch. 11).
18 For a related claim about drives being historically constituted in Lacan’s work, see Ruti, Ethics of Opting Out 65.
19 See also Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics 2–3.
20 For helpful discussion of this point, and of Foucault’s relationship to drive theory more generally, see Cook.
21 In the opening of his 1976 lecture “The Mesh of Power,” Foucault acknowledges that the Freudian concept of drive
need not be interpreted as a simple natural given, a natural biological mechanism upon which suppression would come to posit its law of prohibition, but rather, according to the psychoanalysts, as something which is already profoundly penetrated by suppression [repression].
22 I discuss the relation between socialization and subjection more fully in Allen, Politics of Our Selves.
23 Significantly, Foucault cites denouncements of “Freud’s conformism” and “the normalizing functions of psychoanalysis” as instances or functions of the repressive hypothesis – which strongly suggests, I think, that he would be hesitant to endorse such criticisms (History of Sexuality 5).
24 Whether this is a fair criticism of Lacan or not is another story. I will return to this point below.
25 For discussion of the differences between the Foucaultian and psychoanalytic conceptions of power, see Grace.
26 See, for example, Lacan’s discussion of Antigone in Seminar VII; for helpful critical discussion, see Ruti, Ethics of Opting Out.
27 See Leeb; Ruti, Ethics of Opting Out. “Outside” is in scare quotes here because the real is formed through the cut of the signifier, thus it refers not to a metaphysical or absolute outside of power but rather to an as it were “internal” outside.
28 Thus, unreason would also be an “internal” outside. Although Foucault himself seems to have later given up this idea – perhaps in response to Derrida’s famous critique, which had accused Foucault of metaphysics (Derrida, “Cogito”) – I’m not so convinced that he needed to do so. I discuss the critical potential of Foucault’s conception of unreason more fully in Allen, End of Progress chapter 5.
29 In “The Mesh of Power,” Foucault acknowledges that the Freudian conception of drive need not be interpreted in this way, and even that Freud’s own understanding of drive is more complicated and subtle than he often makes it out to be.
30 Although she tends to talk of drives as innate instincts, Melanie Klein nonetheless offers a sophisticated account of this dynamic. Klein’s account of drives can, however, be taken up in a more relational and thus socially and historically conditioned way, as I have argued more fully in Allen, “Are We Driven?”
31 For interesting discussions of the relationship between Foucault’s late work and psychoanalysis, see Lobb; Ruti, Ethics of Opting Out 162–64; and Sjoholm. As Ruti discusses, Foucault notes the connection between his notion of care of the self and Lacanian analysis in several passages in Hermeneutics of the Subject 29–30 and 187–89.
32 I discuss this aspect of Foucault’s work more fully in Allen, “‘Psychoanalysis and Ethnology’ Reconsidered.”
33 For a beautiful and compelling reconstruction of Lacan’s work along these lines, see Ruti, World of Fragile Things.
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