Psychoanalysis a Discipline that Disciplines

8/14/14, 8:05 AMA Foucauldian Analysis of Psychoanalysis: A Discipline that "Disciplines", by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg

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Academyfor the Study of thePsychoanalytic Arts

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 notexactly the same a bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something todo. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. Ithink that the ethico-political choice we have to make very day is to determine whichis the main danger. (Michel Foucault) 1

One of the ethico-political choices of the later Foucault was to focus on the dangerrepresented by psychoanalysis in our developing disciplinary society. Tendentially,such a society, for Foucault, would be "a regulated, anatomical, hierarchized societywhose time is carefully distributed, its spaces partitioned, characterized by obedienceand surveillance." If we refer to a developing disciplinary society, it is because, forFoucault, these tendencies encounter resistance, not all the trends and practices ofour society are disciplinary, and, therefore, the very powerful disciplinary tendencieswhich characterize modernity do not constitute a totalization. According to Foucault,"'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it isa 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 modernsfind ourselves, has as one of its key feature a political technology of individuals inwhich the repression and domination of people through the violence, or direct threatof violence, by the monarch or ruler has been largely replaced by the control ofpeople through disciplinary technologies and the disciplines, These latter, the humanscience, of which psychoanalysis is one, make it possible to discipline the humansubjects to whose very creation they have been integral. As C. G. Prado has pointedout, central to Foucault's account of modernity is:

... what he calls "disciplines" or what can be glossed as techniques for managingpeople. His point is that disciplinary or managerial techniques were initiated anddeveloped into a technology for the control of individuals. The new techniquescontinued to operate on the body, as had monarchical torture, but they did so byimposing schedules, restrictions, obligatory comportment, and examinations. Incontrast to their brutal predecessors, the new techniques did not inflict violence on

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the body. Instead of inflicting pain, the new techniques instilled controlling habitsand value-sustaining self-images.

If psychoanalysis loomed large in Foucault's concerns about the developingdisciplinary society, it was because it was one of the disciplines which has had adecisive role in constituting the modern subject, which has shaped its verydeployment and the mode in which it is disciplined. According to Louis Sass,"psychoanalysis is by far the most influential contemporary vision of humannature...." 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 andthe contemporary social and political worlds. Moreover, the knowledge proffered bypsychoanalysis presupposes the person of desire, whose essential truth lies in hersexuality, and which is revealed through a confession, a verbalization, brought withinthe confines of a rigorous scientificity. In addition, as Francoise Meltzer has argued,"Psychoanalysis has infiltrated such diverse areas as literature (to which it owes itsmyths), linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, history, feminism, psychology,archeology, neurology, to name some. And it is in the notion of 'some,' perhaps, thatlies the crux of the problem. For there is in psychoanalysis an overt conviction that itexists as the ultimate totality, of which everything else is a part." Beyond the vastscope of its theoretical claims, psychoanalysis also shapes the therapies which aredeployed by the health professions: a s Eli Zaretsky has pointed out, "... all forms ofpsychotherapy, other than drugs or behavioral modification, are based on somevariation 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 tobe universal, and as such, it is rarely questioned.

Foucault's concerns about psychoanalysis were linked to his overall concern to alertus to the dangers involved in that which is taken to be self-evident, universal, andnecessary. Action based on the unexamined, taken-for-granted, assumptions implicitin our practices and thinking can have painful consequences. For, as William E.Connolly has pointed out, Foucault believed that it was the "arbitrary crueltyinstalled in regular institutional arrangements taken to embody the Law, the Good,or the Normal " that was most dangerous. These institutional arrangements are anintegral part of the developing disciplinary society; their cruelty inseparable from it. In the case of psychoanalysis this "arbitrary cruelty" refers to the operations of amode of thinking that creates the binary opposition between normality andpathology. This "dividing practice," to use a Foucauldian trope, is dangerous becauseit judges individuals as "insiders" (normal) and "outsiders" (pathological). Such anordering procedure in effect dictates what an individual should be, namely normal,and then, according to John Caputo, develops "administrative practices andprofessional competencies to see to it that such individuals are in factproduced....Individuals who are specified by the expert, the professional, aspathological come to understand themselves as "sick," and this designation may thenbecome the basis for them not only being stigmatized, but feeling themselves to be,



and understanding themselves as, perverted. What is no less troubling is thesituation of those individuals who do not see themselves as "sick" but who arenonetheless stigmatized by virtue of being so classified. As David Halperin hasasserted, these individuals are unable to speak the truth about their own livesbecause they have "been denied a rational basis on which to speak at all," that powerhaving been arrogated by the expert, the psychoanalyst.

Thus, for example, many psychoanalysts in the 1950's and 1960', including suchprominent figures as Irving Bieber, Lionel Ovesy, and Charles Socarides, designatedhomosexuality as necessarily pathological, and viewed the adoption of heterosexualbehavior to be a valid and important goal of treatment. Their scientifically basedassumption of a supposed normal pattern of sexual development, according toNikolas Rose, simultaneously defined a state that was presumed to be healthy at thelevel 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 rhetoricof pathologization and rejection, causing great personal anguish. That anguish wascompounded by the fact that the homosexual confronted a series of claims andassertions that were supposedly scientifically grounded, and, thereby, seeminglyunchallengeable. As David Halperin has pointed out:

To be, and to find oneself being, known and described--rationally (or so it can bemade to seem) and therefore definitively, more objectively (or so one is told) thanone is capable of describing oneself and therefore irrefutably, resistlessly, and with aninstantaneous finality that preempts and defeats any attempt on one's own part tointervene in the process by which one becomes an object of knowledge, and thatrenders one helpless to stave off the effects of a knowledge one has had no share increating -- that is an experience whose peculiar terror is hard to convey to those whohave never suffered from the social liabilities that cause the rest of us to becontinually and endlessly prey to it.

Foucault's concerns about the "arbitrary cruelty" imposed by the institutions of thedeveloping disciplinary society which act as the arbiter of the " Normal ," to whichWilliam Connolly has called attention, are also reflected in the ways in whichchildren have been normalized through the discursive and social practices ofpsychoanalysis and its allied sciences. Thus, for example, from the work of ArnoldGesell at the Yale Psycho-Clinic to the "Developmental Profile" created at the AnnaFreud Center in England , diagnostic methods for assessing both normality andabnormality in the behavior of children were created. As Nikolas Rose concludedwith reference to the work of Gesell, "childhood is first made visible, in relation to thenormalization of behavioral space within the clinic, then inscribable through therefinement of procedures for documenting individuality, then assessable through theconstruction of scales, charts, and observation schedules." Anna Freud and hercolleagues created a "Developmental Profile" to provide an "internal picture of thechild" with particular emphasis on the interaction of drive (libidinal and aggressive)development and ego and superego development. The child appeared as motivated



by instinctive forces of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, primitive aggression,regression and fantasy. The result, as Rose has pointed out, was that "the psychic lifeof children had been opened directly to the psychoanalytic gaze and renderedobservable, notable, and inscribable in terms of the pertinencies of psychoanalytictheory."

As a result of these discursive and medical practices which are embedded within thedeveloping disciplinary society, in Rose's words, "The human individual has becomecalculable and manageable." However, what of those children whose behavior hasbeen designated as abnormal or pathological, and whose management requirestherapeutic "correction"? Such children may face exclusion and segregation fromtheir peers, be classified as deviants, and become the objects of invasive therapeuticand medical technologies. Given the suffering that is inflicted on children designatedas abnormal, children who do not conform to our management-driven behavioralnorms, we should make a thorough inquiry both into the social and discursivepractices on the basis of which those norms were created, and into the assumptionsunderlying the very institutions and professional expertise that empower us toengage in the classifying and dividing practices of psychoanalysis.

William Connolly has pointed out that Foucault contended "that systematic crueltyflows regularly from the thoughtlessness of aggressive conventionality, thetranscendentalization of contingent identities, and the treatment of good/evil as aduality wired into the intrinsic order of things." It is through "disrupting" our presentpractices and prevailing categories of thought, showing that they were historicallycreated and contingent, not self-evident and necessary, that Foucault hoped to fosterthe critical distance needed to see the dangers inherent in them. For Foucault, "Acritique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter ofpointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged,unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest." Moreover, forFoucault, the work of the critical intellectual is "to question over and over again whatis postulated as self-evident, to disturb people's mental habits, to dissipate what isfamiliar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions...."

Only after showing that things are not self-evident or necessary is the conceptualspace opened up that will provide the opportunity to exercise the freedom to "thinkdifferently" and act otherwise. Thinking differently for Foucault, as C. G. Prado hasasserted, entails the "ceaseless problematization of established truths andknowledges" 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 dominantforms 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 newperspective. Thus, thinking differently, critique, for Foucault, is genealogical, notmetaphysical. Foucauldian critique is not directed to the quest for any transcendental



bases of human thought or action, but rather to separating "out, from thecontingency 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 metaphysicsthat has finally become a science; it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide aspossible, to the undefined work of freedom."

Foucault's conception of the critical intellectual who opens up the space to thinkdifferently is linked to his perspectivism, his experiential notion of truth, and to hisconception of his own works as "fictions." For Foucault, truth is not a linguisticcorrespondence with reality, with the "facts." As a Nietzschean, for Foucault, there isno reality "in itself," no facts, to which truth would correspond, or, at any rate, noway to ground such a conception of truth. Instead there are only interpretations, andtruth is perspectival and experiential; "Truth is not of the order of that which is, butof that which happens, an event. It is not recorded, but created [suscitée]: somethingproduced, not apophantic." Foucault's perspectivism, his contention that his ownconclusions and judgements are interpretations, what Hubert Dreyfus and PaulRabinow have designated his "interpretive analytics," means that his diagnosis ofmodernity as a developing disciplinary society cannot itself be grounded; there isnothing outside the analysis or interpretation itself on which to ground it. As Dreyfusand Rabinow contend, Foucault's "diagnosis that the increasing organization ofeverything 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 pragmaticconcerns and has pragmatic intent, and for that very reason can be contested byother interpretations growing out of other concerns." Foucault's perspectivism, hiscommitment 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, toacknowledge that his interpretations "'are nothing but fictions.'" According toDreyfus and Rabinow, these fictions can be extremely important, though in ways thatreveal "more about society and its practices than about ultimate reality. Interpretation starts from current society and its problems. It gives them agenealogical history, without claiming to capture what the past really was." However,Foucault's fictions, through which he creates the space to think differently, which arean exercise of freedom, are not to be understood as "false" over against statementswhich are true. Rather, these fictions can become true to the extent to which they aretaken up and used to comprehend, and act in, the world. That is, these fictionsbecome true as we think with them, and act in the world on the basis of them. This isclose 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 thesefictions, 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 permanentcritique of ourselves, and of our historical epoch, which applies not just to the truthsestablished 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'smental habits will also apply to his own fictions should they achieve the status ofsuccessful cultural artifacts. Such then is Foucault's "hyper- and pessimisticactivism": the critical intellectual seeks to resist the power-relations inscribed in theprevailing social and discursive practices, seeks to overcome the dangers which theyinstantiate. And it is this hyper- and pessimistic activism which Foucault directs to anencounter with psychoanalysis.

Before turning to the several different elements of a Foucauldian critique ofpsychoanalysis, we need to insist that Foucault's very understanding ofpsychoanalysis arises within the perspective of his confrontation with the developingdisciplinary society, and to stress the fact that psychoanalysis itself is a contestedterm, one without any fixed meaning. Thus, psychoanalysis signifies very differentthings, depending on the time and place in its history. Moreover, the very criteria onthe basis of which one defines psychoanalysis, and who is qualified to be consideredan analyst, will differ greatly depending where one is situated historically, culturally,and linguistically. Psychoanalysis can be best understood as a "floating signifier," asa term that is itself historically contingent and variable. It is therefore important toindicate 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 andheterogeneous elements: modes of training; forms of expertise; systems ofclassification; administrative practices and principles ... theories, strategies, andprogrammes of governance, their targets, aims, ideals, and effects; and agents andauthorities." Moreover, this assemblage which comprises psychoanalysis is but onemanifestation of the developing disciplinary society that so troubled Foucault, andwhose 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 ofimproving the welfare of the individual and the population. To the genealogist thisorder reveals itself to be a strategy, with no one directing it and everyone increasinglyenmeshed 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 thepsychological and social sciences, a discipline that includes a taken-for-grantedunderstanding of the human subject and a therapeutic technology for itsmanagement. The assemblage that comprises psychoanalysis as a discipline entails aparticular discourse on human existence, a life-and identity-defining masternarrative 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 JanaSawicki has pointed out, according to Foucault, psychoanalysis "operates bycategorizing individuals and attaching them to their identities, a form of power thatlocates the truth of the individual in his or her sexuality." It is within the frameworkof the psychoanalytic understanding that the truth of the individual lies in one's



sexuality, that Foucault will explore the profound implications of what has beentermed the "repressive hypothesis."

Indeed, one of the leitmotivs of Foucault's treatment of psychoanalysis as amanifestation of the developing disciplinary society is his thoroughgoing critique ofthe repressive hypothesis. In the broadest sense the repressive hypothesis, which isintegral to the master narrative of psychoanalysis, and to the liberatory schemas ofWilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, which are based on the existence of theFreudian desiring subject, insists that in the West, until the beginning of theseventeenth century, men engaged in "both a non-repressed sexual practice, an openand above-board sexual practice, and a free and joyful prattle, a kind of discourse freeof reticence and disguises, about this sexuality." By the nineteenth century, theVictorian night had descended, and, according to the repressive hypothesis, sexuality,its practice, and its discourse, had been repressed, silenced. In his histories, Foucaulthas shown that the nineteenth century actually saw a preoccupation with sexualityand its manifold forms, an overwhelming concern with sexuality on the part of thebiological and medical disciplines. What concerned Foucault, then, was thedeployment of sexuality, and the forms this deployment has taken in modernity. Ashe contended: "It's not a question of denying sexual misery, but it's also not aquestion of explaining it negatively by repression. The whole problem is tounderstand which are the positive mechanisms that, producing sexuality in such afashion, result in misery."

For Foucault, the repressive hypothesis itself arose with the modern deployment ofsexuality. 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 formin which the claims for sexual liberation have been articulated. However, Foucaultargues that, taken up by sexologists and by anti-repressive therapists, these veryclaims constitute a trap for us:

They basically tell us: 'You have a sexuality, this sexuality is both frustrated andmute, hypocritical prohibitions repress it. So, come to us, show us, confide in us yourunhappy secrets...' This type of discourse is in fact a formidable tool of control andpower. As always, it uses what people say, feel and hope for. It exploits theirtemptation to believe that to be happy, it suffices to cross the threshold of discourseand remove a few prohibitions. It ends up in fact repressing and controllingmovements of revolt and liberation 34.

For Foucault, there is a distinction between repression, and the sexual misery itbrings, and the repressive hypotheses, which rests on the belief in our invariantsexual essence, and needs to be grasped within the framework of a particulardeployment 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 averitable explosion of discourses on sexuality, if not in literature (though if oneincludes pornography, there too), then surely in the biological and medical domain.However, to us what seems most significant in Foucault's critique of the repressivehypothesis 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 transferpoint for relations of power" articulated through a web of scientific and medicaldiscourses and practices operating on the body. These latter constituted theparticular 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 necessitydisobedient to a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and often fails tocontrol it entirely. .... Sexuality is not the most intractable element in power relations,but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for thegreatest number of maneuvers and capable of serving as a point of support, as alynchpin, for the most varied strategies.

Indeed, as David Halperin has insisted, in contrast to the claims of psychoanalysisand its repressive hypothesis, sexuality "...is not some biological or physiologicalreality but an unprecedented historical `apparatus' (dispositif) for the organization ofsubjectivities, social relations, and knowledges...." What Foucault most objected to inthe repressive hypothesis, then, was its somatization and transcendentalization ofsexuality, and the desiring subject. Where psychoanalysis claimed to reveal theperson of desire, Foucault argued that it had created him; where psychoanalysisclaimed to uncover sexuality as the veritable key to our human nature, Foucaultasserted 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. Thesetherapeutic technologies, in which the patient is enjoined to speak the truth about hisor her sexuality, according to Foucault, are linked to the confessional practices ofancient and medieval Christianity. For Foucault, both Christian confession andpsychoanalysis enjoin one to speak, to reveal, to disclose, in the former to a priest, inthe latter to the analyst. Verbalization is the basis of both. What psychoanalysis, andits scientia sexualis has wrought is a veritable transformation of confessionalpractices, which has "caused the rituals of confession to function within the norms ofscientific regularity...."

For Foucault, one of the main dangers of psychoanalysis was precisely its claim toknow and reveal the Truth of the human subject; its denial of the historicity andvariability 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 placethat had made it possible to say only one sort of truth about ourselves: the truthconcerning our desire?" The claim that there is an invariant human subject, theessence of which is revealed by psychoanalysis and its theoretical matrix, facilitatesthe constitution of norms of behavior which can be fashioned on the foundation of itspurportedly scientific knowledge. Therein lies the basis for the various disciplinarytechnologies which are deployed in the developing disciplinary society. It is againstthe backdrop of precisely that danger that Foucault undertakes his confrontationwith psychoanalysis. For James Bernauer:

The significance and form of Foucault's history of the man of desire are best graspedif the history is understood in the context of its contribution to his "archaeology ofpsychoanalysis"; the objective of this latter project was to undermine modernanthropology and the notion of the self that was one of its firmest supports andexpressions. Freud's understanding is a model of this notion, and thus becomes theprincipal target of Foucault's effort to render the self freshly problematic. The failureto recognize the confrontation with Freud that is taking place in Foucault's last workshas often prevented commentators from appreciating his intentions and organizationin these writings....40

For Foucault, what links the various psychoanalytic technologies is that they allprovide procedures for making the self calculable, manageable, and governable alonga set of fixed coordinates. According to Hubert Dreyfus, each of these technologiesemanate from theories which "make causal claims based on an alleged science ofhuman nature which justifies an account of normal and abnormal psychologicalfunction." Each of them postulates a subject, the features of which are fixed andunchangeable. Thus, the Freudian and Kleinian versions of psychoanalysis insist thatthe truth about our human nature is lodged in our sexuality, a vision which theyshare with the anti-repressive hypotheses of Reich and Marcuse. As Dreyfus pointsout, even the currently very influential Lacanian version of Freudianism "assumes anahistorical knowledge of human nature...." For John Rajchman, it was just that claimon the part of Lacan which provoked Foucault's questioning: "Did we really have toplace at the heart of our eros a 'signifying chain' that would always be leading back toan impasse or failing in our desire, and forward to the intricate role this desire wouldkeep having in our lives? Or was this not just the presumption of a specific practice ofinterpretation, a particular 'hermeneutic of the self'?" Similarly, object-relationstheory, one of the most important versions of psychoanalysis is the United Statestoday, assumes that there is a fundamental human striving to relate to others, andthat, according to Ronald Fairbairn, the libido is inherently object-seeking, notpleasure-seeking. Perhaps most important, object-relations theory posits algorithmsof 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 theanalysand'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 andpossibilities for new forms of subjectification in the future. As John Rajchmaninsists, "Foucault took it upon himself to show that the question of 'desire' introducedthrough 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." Incontrast to the psychoanalytic conception of a transcendental subject, the laterFoucault argued that "there is no sovereign, constitutive, subject, a universal form ofthe subject that one can find everywhere." Instead, the subject is a historicallycontingent and changeable cultural identity. Moreover, the Freudian subject, theperson of desire, the subject whom psychoanalysis has claimed to scientificallydiscover and reveal, is, therefore, a cultural construction; indeed, an identityconstructed by psychoanalysis itself as a discipline. According to Gary Gutting,Foucault is especially concerned to challenge the claims of the human sciences "toprovide knowledge of human beings. This is because he sees these disciplines ... asthe primary source of contemporary constraints on human freedom." Theseconstraints arise from the claims of the human sciences, and psychoanalysis inparticular, to reveal the norms on the basis of which the healthy subject mustfunction. The claims to scientificity on the part of these disciplines rest, in Foucault'sview, on the fact that it invests them with enormous power, "a power which the Westsince medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged inscientific discourse." 47

Beyond its claims for the ahistorical character of the subject, and the power itspurported scientificity lends it, Foucault was also concerned to establish thegenealogy of psychoanalysis as a discipline. According to John Towes, "Foucaultperceived psychoanalytic therapeutic practice and its scientific discourse as acomplex formation that stood at the crossroads where most of the importantgenealogies of the modern subject met and interacted. It also functioned as a kind ofepitome of structural similarities in the techniques and discourses that produced themodern sexual subject as well as of an unreflective scientific perspective that deniedthe historicity of its knowledge." Thus, Foucault called our attention not just to theinability of psychoanalysis to acknowledge the historicity of the subject, and its ownrole in the genealogy of the person of desire, but also, and perhaps especially, to itsfailure to address the genealogy of its own all encompassing truth claims.

For Foucault, the very genesis of the discipline of psychoanalysis is itself linked tohistorical changes in the exercise of power-relations, and in particular to theemergence of governmentality. According to the later Foucault, modern power-relations cannot be grasped on the basis of political theory's traditional model ofpower-law-sovereignty-repression. This juridical model of power, which stilldominates political theory, and sees power as emanating from a sovereign, from thetop down, ignores the fact that power today also comes from below. As Leslie PaulThiele 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." Inplace of the juridical model of power, Foucault argues that modern power-relationsare instantiated through what he designates as "governmentality." For Foucault:

The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting inorder the possible outcome. Basically power is less a confrontation between twoadversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. Thisword 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 ofstates; rather it designated the way in which the conduct of individuals or groupsmight 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 ofothers.

For Foucault, then, the operations of the modern state are not restricted tointerdiction or repression in the political sense, but have expanded to incorporate thepractices of governmentality. Government, in the Foucauldian sense, depends on theknowledge generated by the human sciences, by the disciplines, in particularpsychoanalysis; indeed, the state claims that it governs on the basis of thatknowledge. Here, the central role of the human sciences in the operation of thedeveloping disciplinary society, and its techniques for the control and management ofits citizens becomes especially clear. Moreover, governmentality, and thetechnologies 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 notleave the regulation of conduct solely or even primarily to the operations of the stateand its bureaucracies: "Liberal government identifies a domain outside 'politics,' andseeks to manage it without destroying its existence and its autonomy." This isaccomplished through the activities of a host of institutions and agents not formallypart of the state apparatus, including psychoanalytic facilities and analysts. AsNikolas Rose has pointed out, psychoanalysis, like "All the sciences which have theprefix `psy-' or `psycho-' have their roots in this shift in the relationship betweensocial power and the human body, in which regulatory systems have sought to codify,calculate, supervise, and maximize the level of functioning of individuals. The `psysciences' were born within a project of government of the human soul and theconstruction of the person as a manageable subject."

As a manifestation of governmentality and its power-relations, psychoanalysis isimplicated in the control of the individual. For Foucault, psychoanalysis is adiscipline that "disciplines," that helps to create politically and economicallysocialized, useful, cooperative, and -- as one of the hallmarks of bio-power -- docileindividuals. Indeed, according to John Forrester, for Foucault, psychoanalysis is "thepurest version of the social practices that exercise domination in and throughdiscourse, whose power lies in words, whose words can never by anything other thaninstruments 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, theresult of the psychoanalytic management-oriented conception of the subject is anindividual who is susceptible to techno-medical control. Moreover, as Nikolas Rosehas suggested, the power-knowledge obtained by psychoanalysis (and indeed all ofthe 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 anddistributed to particular social locations in the light of them -- in schools, jobs, ranksin the army, types of reformatory institutions, and so forth. Further, in consequence,new means emerged for the codification and analysis of the consequences oforganizing classrooms, barracks, prisons, production lines, the family, and social lifeitself....Hence, the psy knowleges could feed back into more general economic andsocial programs, throwing up new problems and opportunities for attempts tomaximize the use of the human resources of the nation and to increase its levels ofpersonal health and well-being.

Whatever its impact or health and welfare, this power-knowledge enhanced thedegree of control to which the person was subject, and made it possible to effectivelydiscipline the individual. Indeed, the existence of our developing disciplinary societyis inconceivable without the psy sciences, and the power-relations which theyconsolidate.

The discipline and control of the individual to which psychoanalysis made its signalcontribution, was linked to its conception of, and commitment to, normalization.Foucault signalled the increasing role of normality and normalization in thefunctioning of the developing disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish: "Thejudges 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 themthat the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever hemay find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, hisachievements." For Foucault, discipline and normalization were inseparablecomponents of the emergence of the human sciences, and their technologies. Indeed,he asserted that "a normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology ofpower 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 hisposition on the matter of normalization." Indeed, psychoanalysis was thoroughlyimplicated 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 trulybecomes a society of the norm, medicine, par excellence the science of the normaland the pathological, assumes the status of a royal science." Lest one conclude thatFoucault 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, itcertainly functions as therapy, as a medical type of intervention. From this point ofview, it is very much a part of this network of medical 'control' which is beingestablished all over." Deviation from the norm, in the establishment of whichpsychoanalysis played a signal role, the anomaly, became the object of thetechnologies and therapeutic techniques of the psy sciences, psychoanalysis amongthem. The theological conception of evil had given way to the psychoanalyticconception of deviance, in the combat against which the analyst was now enlisted toplay a leading role. As Hubert Dreyfus has claimed, "Freudian theory thus reinforcesthe collective practices that allow norms based on alleged sciences of human natureto permeate every aspect of our lives." These practices then become a lynchpin of thedeveloping disciplinary society and its techniques for managing people.

If Foucault situates psychoanalysis within the orbit of a developing normalizingdisciplinary society of control, a governmentalized society, his genealogy ofpsychoanalysis scrupulously avoided any essentialization of that discipline, anyjudgement as to its intrinsic danger. Indeed, based upon his interpretive analytics,his perspectivism, Foucault's understanding of psychoanalysis could only be aninterpretation. 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 bylooking at specific instances, and not by setting up general criteria. No doubt this isthe point Foucault was making in one of his last interviews when he said: 'My point isnot 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 inherentlyoppressive, 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, thepsychiatry of degeneracy, eugenics and heredity." As Dreyfus and Rabinow show,"Foucault points out that particularly in its early days, whatever its normalizingfunction later on, psychoanalysis demonstrated a persistent and courageousresistance to all theories of hereditary degeneracy." In breaking the link betweenpathology and heredity, in asserting that the division between the normal and theabnormal was not biological, and that it ran through each individual, in itsconception of the unconscious, which challenged the claim of consciousness to be theessence of our human being, psychoanalysis had a liberating role to play at itsinception. 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 verydifferent conclusions reached by the later Foucault, pertains to the historical context



in which psychoanalysis is situated. In The Order of Things, Foucault wascounterposing Freud's theoretical breakthroughs and their impact to the orthodoxiesof nineteenth century psychiatry. The later Foucault, by contrast, was concerned withthe role of psychoanalysis as a discourse and complex of therapeutic technologieswhich had become one of the orthodox pillars of the normalizing disciplinary society.

Even in the contemporary world, socio-political context may still allowpsychoanalysis to play a liberating role. Thus, for Foucault, "in certain countries (Iam thinking of Brazil in particular), it has played a political role, denouncing thecomplicity of psychiatrists with political power." The same thing was true in theSoviet Union, where those who were drawn to psychoanalysis tended to be critical ofthe Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes, in contrast to the psychiatric profession.Moreover, one can easily imagine that in West African societies whereclitoridectomies are routinely performed, and socially sanctioned, psychoanalysisand its insistence on the centrality of sexuality to one's personhood would beprogressive in its impact. "But the fact remains that in our societies the career ofpsychoanalysis has taken other directions and has been the object of differentinvestments. Certain of its activities have effects which fall within the function ofcontrol and normalisation."

Beyond even its complicity in the control and normalization of the individual, theincorporation of the assemblage of psychoanalysis in the dispositif of the developingdisciplinary society, the symmetry of its therapeutic technologies with the expandingsphere of governmentality, what Foucault saw as so dangerous in psychoanalysiswere its discursive practices -- which it shared with modern humanism -- throughwhich "a certain idea or model of humanity was developed, and now this idea of manhas become normative, self-evident, and is supposed to be universal. .... What I amafraid of about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our ethics as auniversal model for any kind of freedom." It was the scientific claim ofpsychoanalysis to speak the Truth of the human subject that so frightened anddisturbed Michel Foucault.

In contrast to that notion of a true self that is supposed to answer the question "whoam I?" with a universal model of a normalized self, Foucault's idea, according to JohnCaputo, is "not only not to answer the question but to see to it that no one else isallowed to answer it either. He wanted to keep this question open, and above all toblock the administrators and professionals and managers of all sorts from answeringthis question, thereby closing us in on some constituted identity or another thatrepresents a strictly historical, that is, contingent constraint." Foucault was notinterested in attempting to generate a new normative idea of a self to whichindividuals should conform. What individuals should become is not of Foucault's oranyone else's business. As we have said, what Foucault was attempting to do was toopen up spaces, "to give new impetus ... to the undefined work of freedom." In termsof our present socio-political context, that means freedom for the individual to inventherself.



This is the link between Foucault's genealogy of psychoanalysis and his exploration oftechnologies 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 theself," 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, asubject based on its sexuality, then Foucault was convinced "that there are moresecrets, more possible freedoms, and more inventions in our future than we canimagine in humanism as it is dogmatically represented on every side of the politicalrainbow...." For Foucault, the continuous critique of ourselves, of what we havecontingently become, and of our historical epoch, all in the service of an ethic ofpermanent resistance against the obstacles to our re-creating ourselves, can unlockthose secrets, and perhaps instantiate those possible freedoms.

The preoccupation of the final Foucault with technologies of the self was theconcretization of the project he had adumbrated on the final page of the first volumeof 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 longerunderstand 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 dedicatedto the endless task of forcing its secret, of exacting the truest confession from ashadow." The final volumes of The History of Sexuality, The Use of Pleasure, andThe Care of the Self, as Joel Black has argued, were about "an alternative to themodern, 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 andaesthetics, 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 asa bulwark of the developing, normalizing, disciplinary society. As AlexanderNehamas has persuasively argued, Foucault passionately "believed that the 'care ofthe 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 andHermeneutics, Second Edition With an Afterword by and an Interview with MichelFoucault (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 231-232.

2. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, Edited by SylvereLotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), p. 189.

3. Peter Miller also seeks to avoid the risk of totalization, and the danger of failing tosee the extent to which "individuals constantly escape, evade and subvert thefunctioning of discipline." He, therefore, distinguishes a "disciplinary society" from a



"disciplined society." See Peter Miller, Domination and Power (London and NewYork: 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) ofPsychoanalysis, Edited by Francoise Meltzer (Chicago and London: The University ofChicago Press, 1988), p. 2.

8. Eli Zaretsky, "Bisexuality, Capitalism and the Ambivalent Legacy ofPsychoanalysis, New Left Review, Number 223, May/June 1997, p. 70.

9. William E. Connolly, "Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of MichelFoucault," Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3, August 1993, p. 366.

10. John Caputo, "On Not Knowing Who We Are: Madness, Hermeneutics, and theNight of Truth in Foucault," in John Caputo and Mark Yount (Eds.), Foucault and theCritique of Institutions (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania StateUniversity Press, 1993), p. 250.

11. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York andOxford: 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 MaleHomosexuality (London: Quartet, 1989), and Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention ofHeterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995).

14. David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault, p. 176.

15. Nikolas Rose, "Calculable Minds and Manageable Individuals," History Of TheHuman 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 byLawrence 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 FoucaultReader (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 andHermeneutics, 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 andHermeneutics, 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 andSociety, Vol. 21, No. 3, August 1992, p. 216. The term "assemblage" has been takenover from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

30. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism andHermeneutics, p. xxvi.

31. Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (New Yorkand 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, FoucaultLive, 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 andErotic Identities in the Pseudo-Lucianic Erotes" in Jan Goldstein (Ed.), Foucault andthe 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 ofthe links between Christian confession and its transformation by psychoanalysis, andthe ways in which "the sexual confession come[s] to be constituted in scientificterms" (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 forThought (New Jersey and London: Humanities Press, 1990), p. 167.

41. Hubert L. Dreyfus, "Foucault's Critique of Modern Psychiatry," Journal ofModern 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 etEcrits: 1954-1988, Vol. IV, p. 733. While this formulation of Foucault's, with itsuniversalistic, 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 rejectionof the claim -- explicit or implicit in psychoanalysis -- that there could be, in thewords of Alexander Nehamas, "a complete theory of interpretation of anything, aview that accounts for 'all' the facts...." See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life asLiterature (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 theFoucault/Habermas Debate, Edited by Michael Kelly (Cambridge, Massachusetts andLondon, England: The MIT Press, 1994), p. 24.

48. John E. Toews, "Foucault and the Freudian Subject: Archaeology, Genealogy, andthe 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 ofPower," 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 hisideas from the totalizing claims of traditional political theory, Thiele claims thattheory is always perspectival, and thereby reclaims the term for a genealogicalperspective.

50. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power" in Dreyfus and Rabinow, MichelFoucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, p. 221, our emphasis.

51. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, "Political power beyond the state: problematics ofgovernment," 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. EllenHerman has shown the extent to which psychoanalysis forged a strategic alliancewith the American state during World War Two, applying its technologies to therequirements of foreign and military policy. See Ellen Herman, The Romance ofAmerican Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia 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: SelectedInterviews 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, MentalIllness and Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. xxxviii.

62. Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, pp. 54-55. Foucault himself understood thatdespite 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 meantto be a genealogy." See Michel Foucault, "Power Affects the Body" in MichelFoucault, 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 andHermeneutics, 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 possibilitythat the evolution of the developing disciplinary society, such as the growth of HMO'sin managing health care, and the efficiency and savings in replacing long-termpsychotherapy by drugs, such as prozac and other powerful psychopharmaceuticals,may again lead psychoanalysis to function in a liberating fashion, at least inopposition 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 MassachusettsPress, 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 DavidH. 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 theancients construed as the forms of ethical work, as "an exercise of oneself in theactivity of thought." See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of theHistory 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 ofNew York. He has published on Marxism, modern genocide, Max Weber, Heidegger, Foucault, andpostmodernism. 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 NewYork. 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: CriticalEncounters, with Alan Milchman (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming); ContemporaryPortrayals of Auschwitz: Philosophical Challenges, with James Watson and Detlef B. Linke (HumanityBooks); Psychoanalytic Versions of the Human Condition, with Paul Marcus (NYU press, 1998); HealingTheir 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). Back to Academy Library

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Psychoanalysis a Discipline that Disciplines

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