ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the spectrum of the critique of science ranged from compliance to a virtually impossible mode of resistance; and that the critic needed to find way somewhere within set of possibilities. It offers a neurophysiological analogue for an important aspect of early Freud theory of childhood sexual trauma, namely, how and why childhood sexual experiences are retroactively and pathogenically remembered as traumatic in adulthood. Critique need not simply be concerned with extricating selfhood from the rationality of the neurosciences. It might instead function as an investigation into how and why the language of neuroscience would have been sutured into accounts of the self, and for reasons that were not inevitable, essential, or obvious. Freud is representative of similar anxieties and preoccupations linked to new pathologies of personhood and, specifically, to certain institutional-forensic demands on the self. More specifically, the very relationship between pathology and accident was typically framed as a forensic and juridical affair.
