ABSTRACT
While Foucault recognised that psychoanalysis did not fall under the epistemology of the human sciences – an argument he developed in The Order of Things – he considered that it remained grounded in confession. Giving its most pure expression to the principle according to which the subject’s truth is to be found in the discourse on his/her sexuality, psychoanalysis appeared as an additional element within the deployment of sexuality. Yet Foucault recognized it was “more an ethical technique than a science.”
It seems pertinent to question how psychoanalysis, “a technique of the self’s work on the self” based on confession, became an “ethical technique”; and to study its links to a history of sexuality in antiquity. My intention here is to examine if psychoanalysis, while apprehending the subject through a hermeneutic of the self based on knowledge, might be more likely to highlight modes of subjectivation involving strategies of the self, practices of the self observed in classical, Hellenistic, then Roman Greece. I will argue that only a “strategic” understanding of psychoanalysis makes it possible to consider in a psychoanalytical, neither expert nor pathologizing way nonbinary sexualities and genders.
