ABSTRACT
I propose to consider the relation between language, the body, andpsychoanalysis in this essay by focusing on a particular act, the act of confession.1 This act is not a simple one, as you probably know, but it does have a central relationship to the clinical setting, as I understand it. In popular culture, the therapist’s office is very often figured as the place one goes in order to make a confession. In the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, psychoanalysis is described as the historical descendant of the confessional, a view that constitutes something of an accepted version of psychoanalysis among his followers.2
