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DREYFUS
ABSTRACT. From his earliest published work, Mental Illness and Personality
(1954), to his last project, The History of Sexuality, Foucault was critical of the
human sciences as a dubious and dangerous attempt to model a science of
human beings on the natural sciences. He therefore preferred existential
therapy, which did not attempt to give a causal account of human nature, but
rather described the general structure of the human way of being and its
possible distortions. Foucault focused his attack on psychiatry, which claimed
to have an explanation of normal and abnormal functioning of the personality
modeled on medicine. Freud typified for him this deep mistake which he
traced first to the Kantian understanding of human beings as transcendental/
empirical doubles which must think their own unthought, and then later to
the gradually developing confessional practices which lead people in our
culture to try unsuccessfully to put all their desires into words so as to
conform to the norms of psychoanalysis which in turn are based on an
account of sexuality as a cause of personality. Foucault proposed his genealogical account of how our culture arrived at this view of man as sexual being as
a form of therapy which was to help us free ourselves from this restrictive
self- interpretation.
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These claims need explaining and defending. Explaining, because Foucault is assuming an existential phenomenological conception of the personality and of psychiatry. Defending, because
later Foucault holds that all disciplines, even natural science and
medicine, can make statements that are taken to be true or false
only against a historically conditioned background of shared
practices. Given his concern with "truth-effects" rather than truth
claims, it might seem that his early appeal to "valid abstraction
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Mendel spoke the truth, but he was not dans le vrai (within the true) of
contemporary biological discourse: it simply was not along such lines that
objects and biological concepts were formed . . . . It is always possible to speak
the truth in a void; one would only be in the true, however, if one obeyed the
rules of some discursive "policy". . . (Foucault, 1976b, p. 224).
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ods dictated not by their subject matter but by the power practices under which they were developed. At the time of Discipline
and Punish, a relatively late work, Foucault still seems to hold this
view of the natural sciences:
What Great Observer will produce the methodology of examination for the
human sciences? Unless, of course, such a thing is not possible. For, although it
is true that, in becoming a technique for the empirical sciences, the investigation has detached itself from the inquisitorial procedure, in which it was
historically rooted, the examination has remained extremely close to the
disciplinary power that shaped it (Foucault 1977a, p. 226).
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the relations of representation and finitude come into play (Foucault, 1976a,
p. 374).
By following the same path as the human sciences, but with its gaze turned the
other way, psychoanalysis moves towards the moment by definition inaccessible to any theoretical knowledge of man . . . at which the contents of
consiousness . . . stand gaping, upon man's finitude. . . . [a] region where
representation remains in suspense . . . (Foucault, 1976a, p. 374).
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What has just been said is not intended as an a priori criticism of any attempt
to circumscribe the phenomena of madness or to define a strategy of cure. It
was intended simply to show a particular relation between psychology and
madness and a disequilibrium so fundamental that they rendered vain any
man identifed himself not with his public deeds but with his
most private intentions, desires, fantasies, and dreams. Moreover,
since what one desired might well be forbidden and thus the
desire disguised, one had to be suspicious of one's desires and
constantly work to dredge up one's true motivations. Foucault
quotes a confession manual: "Examine . . . all your thoughts,
every word you speak, and all your actions. Examine even unto
your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them
your consent. And finally, do not think that in so sensitive and
perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial or insignificant"
(1978, p. 20). This is the motto of the hermeneutic subjects we
have all become.
In classical Freudian theory, since pathology arises from repressed unsatisfied desires returning as symptoms, health would
consist in constantly retrieving the repressed desires so as either
to satisfy them, substitute other acceptable goals, or maturely
resign oneself to not being able to fulfill one's infantile and antisocial demands. But caught in the confessional practices that
underly the structure of the cogito and the unthought, we can
never suceed. "We convince ourselves that we have never said
enough on the subject, that, through inertia or submissiveness,we
conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence, and that what is
essential always eludes us, so that we must always start out once
again in search of it" (1978, p. 33). Thus, in principle, Freudian
theory advocates the interminable analysis of one's desires, fantasies, and dreams and so contributes to the practices that tend to
make everyone into self-normalizing subjects. Each person is led
to seek the truth about himself, and thus to assure that all his
actions and even his thoughts in every area of life do not deviate
from what science has shown to be normal, healthy, and productive.
Foucault does not deny that people's desires are important
aspects of their personality and that, on occasion, when, for
example, one's actions are self-defeating, it makes sense to ask
oneself what one really wants. He never had reason to retract his
remark at the end of Mental Illness and Personality, that
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attempt to treat the whole of madness, the essence and nature of madness, in
terms of psychology (Foucault, 1976a, p. 76).
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self-overcoming for its own sake. Freedom, for Foucault, is freedom from every universal norm, even this post-modern one. It is
freedom to give one's life the stability and uniqueness of a work
of art. As Foucault said in his last interview: "The search for a
form of morality acceptable by everyone in the sense that everyone would have to submit to it, seems catastrophic to me" ("Le
Retour de la Morale," Les nouvelles, 28 June 1984, p. 37).
When the later Foucault approaches psychoanalysis, not just
as a would-be-science of man, but as a power practice characteristic of modern Western society, he includes the Lacanian version of Freud. Even Lacan still assumes an ahistorical knowledge
of human nature, viz., that man's deepest desires can never be
satisfied and that one must therefore accept the meaninglessness
of desire and of human existence. He, therefore, proposes a
therapy based on the need to articulate what one can of the
unthought so as to be liberated from it. In a 1977 interview with
Lacan's successor, Jacques-Alain Miller, Foucault points out that
even in Lacanian psychoanalysis "the subject is incited to produce
a discourse of truth about his sexuality which is capable of having
effects on the subject himself" (Gordon, 1980, pp 215216).
Once we see why Foucault regards psychoanalysis as a dangerous pseudoscience, we are in a position to see why an account
of psychopathology free from a theory of normal functioning along
with a therapy with other aims than liberating us from the supposed causal effects of repressed desires by requiring us to tell the
truth about the contents of our minds, were once, and might still
be, acceptable to him.
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Foucault cites with approval Anna Freud's The Ego and the
Mechanisms of Defense, and suggests that one could and should
describe and treat styles of defenses as they show up in the
present without regarding them as clues to internal unconscious
pathology, as if that were the real cause of the problem. "A style
of psychological coherence must be found that authorizes the
understanding of morbid phenomena without taking as its referential model stages described in the manner of biological phases"
(Foucault, 1976a; pp. 41-42).
The proposal that one avoid pseudo-science by defining pathological patterns of behavior without seeking underlying causes
leads Foucault to Ludwig Binswanger's existential phenomenological psychiatry a form of diagnosis that is not based on
causal theory and a type of therapy that does not advocate a
hermeneutic inspection of desire. Since existential phenomenological psychiatry is now rather unfamiliar, we will need to consider briefly the different understanding of mind and reality
underlying the Freudian and the existential approaches.
We have seen that Freud presupposed a Cartesian/Kantian
view of the mind. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, reacting against the Cartesian tradition,
have developed an alternative model of the mind's relation to
reality. This account is so radical that, strictly speaking, these
philosophers do not refer to the mind at all. Rather they prefer
to speak of the way the whole human being is related to the
world. Indeed, even "relation" is misleading, since it suggests the
coming together of two separate entities human beings and
the world whereas these philosophers see mind and world as
inseparable. So they are finally driven to replace the epistemological relation of subject and object with a way of being they call
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The analysis of the dream was not exhausted at the level of a hermeneutic of
symbols; but, starting from an external interpretation which is still a kind of
deciphering, one was to . . . arrive at an understanding of the existential
structures (Foucault, 1955, p. 15).
Binswanger used the ontological structure of a patient's existence rather than a causal, genetic account of intra-psychic forces,
as a framework for constructing a narrative that was intended to
capture the developing pattern of a patient's life. Foucault explains:
It is a question of restoring, through his understanding, both the experience
that the patient has of his illness (the way in which he experiences himself as a
sick or abnormal individual) and the morbid world on which this consciousness
of illness opens . . . . The understanding of the sick consciousness and the
reconstitution of its pathological world, these are the two tasks of a phenomenology of mental illness (Foucault, 1976a, p. 46).
skills and thus with the bodily stance we take toward people and
things. Each person not only incorporates his culture's understanding of human beings and of objects, but also his sub-culture's
and family's variations on the current social practices. Thus, each
person comes to have or to be his own embodied understanding
of what counts as real, which is, of course, not private but is a
variation on the shared public world.
This ontological as opposed to epistemological view of human
being leads to an alternative account of the unconscious, of
psychopathology, and of therapy. Binswanger worked out and
practiced this alternative. He understood psychopathology as a
distortion of the human clearing that makes it narrow and rigid.
Binswanger was concerned with describing the style of a patient's
world. For example, as Foucault explains in his introduction to
Binswanger's book on dreams, he was not interested in the symbolic meaning of the content of dreams but in the personal style of
structuring space and time that dreams reveal.
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One has only to think of those jealous individuals who justify their mistrust,
their interpretations, their delusional systematizations, by a meticulous genesis
of their suspicions that seems to dilute their symptoms throughout their
existence . . . They see in their morbid jealousy the deepest truth, the most
radical misfortune of their existence. They normalize it by referring it to the
whole of their previous life (Foucault, 1976a, p. 48).
When this happens, the person's world or clearing becomes restricted and rigid. The person suffers from a lack of possibilities
that he cannot understand and over which he has no control. To
highlight the contrast with Freudian depth psychology, this ontological account of psychopathology as the expanding of content
into context, might be called breadth psychology.
This is, of course, a non-representational version of the unconscious. Merleau-Ponty uses as an example of such a generalized
unconscious the case of someone who relates to each person as if
the issue were one of determining who is inferior and who is
superior. In Merleau-Ponty's terms, inferior/superior, once an issue
in the clearing, has become a dimension of the clearing. MerleauPonty uses the notion of context this time called "atmosphere"
to explain why such a self-defeating stance is outside of the
sufferer's awareness and control
An inferiority complex . . . means that I commited myself to inferiority, that I
have made it my abode, that this past, thought not a fate, has at least a specific
weight and is not a set of events over there, at a distance from me, but the
atmosphere of my present. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 442).
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Power relations can materially penetrate the body in depth, without depending . . . on the mediation of the subject's own representations. If power takes
hold on the body, this isn't through its having first to be interiorised in
people's consciousness (Gordon, 1980, p. 186).
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and organizes the activities of researchers in a scientific community. Soren Kierkegaard (1941) emphasizes that a lover or a cause
to which one is committed can serve the same function in an
individual's life.
Merleau-Ponty introduces a similar idea concerning the role of
particular objects or events in an individual's life.
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For then the therapeutic, genealogical, reconstruction of the arbitrariness of the patient's sense of reality would be seen by the
patient merely as showing the strange and idiosyncratic route he
followed in arriving at his truth. Fortunately, however, this need
not be his response. When a patient's world becomes totalized
and one-dimensional, other ways of behaving from earlier days
endure. These marginal stances, interpretations and practices are
not taken up into the one-dimensional clearing precisely because
they are too fragmentary and trivial to be seen as important. The
therapist must recover and focus these lost possibilities. Here, the
therapist as positive paradigm has a curative role.
Thus, without a causal theory of the functional components of
a personality and their normal and abnormal functioning, but with
only a description of human being as a space opened up by
interpretation, and a typology of possible distortions of that
clearing, the phenomenological therapist can give an account of
psychological problems and offer a genealogical cure. No wonder
Foucault favored existential, ontological psychiatry.3
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NOTES
* This is a revised version of an article that appeared in PsychCritique, Vol. 2,
No. 1 (1987), entitled 'Foucault's Therapy', on pages 65 through 83. Copyright
by Ablex Publishing Corporation. Printed with permission.
1
This volume was originally published by Presses Universitaires de France in
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REFRENCES
Dreyfus, H.: 1979, What Computers Can't Do, 2nd ed. Harper and Row, New
York.
Dreyfus, H.: forthcoming, Being-in-the-world: A Commentary on Division 1 of
Being and Time, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P.: 1983, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics. 2nd ed., University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Foucault, M: 1955, Introduction to L. Binswanger, Le Reve et I'Existence, Desclee
de Brouwer, Paris.
Foucault, M.: 1970, The Order of Things, Harper and Row, New York.
Foucault, M.: 1976a, Mental Illness and Psychology, Harper and Row, New
York. (To be reprinted by University of California Press in 1987.)
Foucault, M.: 1976b, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Harper and Row, New
York.
Foucault, M.: 1977a, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Pantheon,
New York.
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