ABSTRACT
This double function of psychoanalysis is precisely what Jacques Derrida (1994) meant to draw out when he wrote of Foucault’s relationship with Freud that it resembled precisely the fort/da game itself. Just as Freud’s 18-month-old grandson famously explored the dynamics of presence and absence by casting with a wooden toy on a string from the edge of his crib, pronouncing it gone (fort!) only to retrieve it a moment later with the exclamation “there” (da!), so Foucault, Derrida alleges, worked through his relationship with Freud, alternately banishing him to a function of power only to resurrect him as an agent of critique. Freud was for Foucault a hinge, a pivot that served alternately to impose a mechanism of control, but also to interrogate and subvert all such schemes. Psychoanalysis alternately inscribed a field of madness as the “unreasonable” object of a bona fide science, but also activated and opened up a dialogue with that field – a realm of “unreason” that was madness itself. What I am most interested in here, and what I think is more relevant to Professor Layton’s approach, is the function of psychoanalysis, not as disciplinary technology but as counter-science, one that cuts against the hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism itself. And to get at that counter-hegemonic potential, it is worth spending another moment with Foucault, and with his reflection on the psychological professions as fundamentally social in character.
