ABSTRACT
This chapter will consider what Foucault sees as among the paradigmatic causes and activities of the “confessing animal”: psychoanalysis. A critique of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, or of the diffuse effects of the psychological disciplines on all aspects of modern occidental society, discourse and subjectivity, runs through almost all of Foucault’s works, including his studies of confession, and Todd May has stated that the “critique of psychology is a leitmotif in Foucault’s texts.”2 Nevertheless, although psychoanalysis is frequently mentioned in passing, unlike psychiatry it is never discussed in depth. In many of Foucault’s books psychoanalysis is mentioned only in the fi nal few pages of the work, and then only in the rhetorical fl ourishes of his concluding remarks. Freud puts in an appearance only on the second to last page of The Birth of the Clinic, for instance, and in the last fi ve pages of Maladie mentale et psychologie, while in Madness and Civilization Foucault leaves off just at the moment in history when psychoanalysis is born and Freud begins, and thus, with the exception of a few passing remarks, Freud is discussed only in the fi nal three pages of the work. Foucault’s ongoing critique of psychoanalysis is most explicit in the fi rst volume of The History of Sexuality, and yet even in this book Foucault rarely mentions Freud or any other psychoanalytic theorist by name: Freud is named eight times, including, once more, in the last few pages of the book, and Wilhelm Reich is mentioned twice, but the discussion is each time fl eeting and superfi cial. Despite the signifi cance of the notion of a “repressive hypothesis” in this work, Foucault does not engage with psychoanalytic texts on repression and the unconscious, drawing less on Freud’s metapsychology than on the manners in which a more general understanding of these notions has been deployed throughout modern occidental society.
