ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault prefers the latter assumption and more precisely he sees the origins of modern psychology in the eighteenth-century contributions of Immanuel Kant. Psychology will continue to remain the most important of the social sciences, according to Foucault, because of its ‘disciplining’ capabilities. Foucault turned the power of discourse analysis against his own privileged background. His upper-class education included Jesuit schooling and bouts of rebelliousness interspersed with self-harming. His attempted suicide at the age of twenty-two resulted in his first brush with psychiatry. The genealogical method is quite similar but Foucault’s concerns underwent subtle changes in the 1970s. In a documentary for Dutch TV Foucault recounts how ‘western civilisation’ has been familiar for a long time with the phenomenon of madness. A. Negri claims that during the 1970s Foucault was beginning to question some of his structuralist positions and was very gradually moving towards a more nuanced post-structuralist perspective.
