ABSTRACT

For more than a hundred years now psychology has not ceased to calibrate the human subject. It has given itself the task of plotting the distribution of human characteristics, of charting people’s ‘abnormalities’ and ‘pathologies’; it has drawn up taxonomies of behaviour that seek to set the norms of human conduct. Its findings are inscribed in a multitude of practices in institutions of all kinds. But does psychology have the measure of the subject? And what do all these instruments regulate?