La question de psychanalyse chez Michel Foucault

Abstract

The article focuses on how Michel Foucault made use of psychoanalysis, of which he was a great reader in the 1950s, mainly Freud. If the psychoanalysis is sometimes enrolled in a “psy-function” and is not the subject of a specific course at the Collège de France like psychiatry, it nevertheless appears as a long-standing problem, a reference that persists throughout Foucault’s work, even if it is approached in a very pointillist way. In this sense, it has a separate status within this function, sometimes contradictory, sometimes quite obscure, sometimes the matrix of all disciplinary institutions, sometimes the form of depsychiatrization outside asylum. Alongside an “instrumental” use that is bound to the problem of knowledge-power, there are some quite singular uses. Foucault thus manipulates the concept of the unconscious to the point of making it completely heterogeneous to the knowledge developed by Freud and revised by Lacan.

Keywords

• psychoanalysis
• use
• Sigmund Freud
• Jacques Lacan
• knowledge-power
• unconscious