ABSTRACT
Foucault wrote many books and articles which challenged the stability of the individual subject. For example, as I discussed in the previous chapter, his work in The History of Sexuality aimed to question whether one's preference for certain types of sexual acts with certain types of people marked one out as a particular type of individual, thus destabilising the very notion of gendered and sexual identity. In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and The Order of Things (1973), he tried to develop a form of analysis which focused on the impersonal and abstract forces of discourse in structuring the individual, thus calling into question the notion of the individual as any more than a site where discourses are played out, as I discussed in Chapter 2. In addition, Foucault also analysed a subject which is perhaps at the heart of the notion of the individual: the construction of the notion of mental illness. Although most of Foucault's academic training was in philosophy, after his first degree he trained for a higher degree in psychology and a diploma in pathological psychology, and he worked for a short period in a mental hospital and psychologically assessed prisoners; this interest in psychology persisted in many of his works, most notably in Madness and Civilisation (1967). He himself suffered persistently from depression and attempted suicide on several occasions. This may have been partly due to the great difficulty at this time about being openly homosexual, but it does suggest that ‘his pronounced interest in 98psychology stemmed from elements in his own life’ ( Eribon 1991: 27). These concerns with challenging our conventional views on mental illness and sexuality have led him to emphasise the importance of trying to analyse without employing the notion of the individual subject and to see the subject as an effect of discourses and power relations.
