Psychology and the historical power–body conjunction: Foucault’s different view of the history and philosophy of psychology

Foucault and Nietzsche

In an interview shortly before his death, Foucault confirmed his enthusiasm for Nietzsche: “My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger. I nevertheless recognize that Nietzsche outweighed him. My knowledge of Nietzsche certainly is better than my knowledge of Heidegger. ⁸ Nevertheless, these are the two fundamental experiences I have had” (Foucault & Kritzman, 1990, p. 250). In 1975, Foucault stated:

It was Nietzsche who specified the power relation as the general focus, shall we say, of philosophical discourse – whereas for Marx it was the production relation. Nietzsche is the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think of power without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so. (Foucault, 1980, p. 53; 2001a, p. 1621)

In his seminal 1971 paper, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1984), ⁹ Foucault expresses his indebtedness to Nietzsche for an alternative conception of history and historical analysis, specifically for the concept of genealogy. With reference to Nietzsche’s works, Foucault believes that Nietzsche’s concept of “origin,” or “Ursprung,” is directed toward “that which was already there” without falling into the metaphysical notion that there exists something timeless and essentially secret (Foucault, 1984, p. 78). According to Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, genealogy rejects the pursuit of the origin for a conception of historical beginnings as lowly, complex, and contingent.

This view is reminiscent of the Nietzschean-inspired epistemology of the French epistemologists Cavaillès (1938, 1960), Bachelard (1934), and Canguilhem (1966), which gained wide recognition among French academics (Gutting, 1989). Their task was to modify Husserl’s notion that everything can be followed back to a small set of immediate or basic a priori truths, which function in the pure logical disciplines as “axioms” or pure, universal, a priori concepts to explain how knowledge and concepts change through history. In his 1934 work, The New Scientific Spirit (Le nouvel esprit scientifique), Bachelard states,

Rationalism need not be a closed system; a priori assumptions are subject to change. It should therefore be of some interest to take a fresh approach to the philosophy of science, to examine the subject without preconceptions and free of the straitjacket imposed by the traditional vocabulary of philosophy. (Bachelard, 1934/1984, p. 3)

Like the French epistemologists, but with reference to Nietzsche, Foucault suggests in his 1971 paper that there can be no constants in history, no ahistorical essences, no immobile forms or uninterrupted continuities structuring the past. ¹⁰ In contrast to the abovementioned French epistemologists, who do not address the historical power–body conjunction, Foucault’s readings of Nietzsche see historical events as impressing themselves not only on things and events but also on the human mind and body. With reference to Nietzsche, Foucault describes the body as a “surface of inscription of events” (1984, p. 83) and believes that “the body manifests the stigma of past experience and also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors” (1984, p. 83). As an analysis of descent, genealogy is thus situated within the articulation of “the body and history” (1984, p. 83). It establishes that nothing is stable; not even our nature and physiology escape the play of historical forces. “The body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it conducts resistances” (1984, p. 87).

According to Fujita (2013), seeing the body as history, as Foucault and Nietzsche do, the body does not signify only the flesh of an individual; it signifies a much larger existence in the temporal sense as well as in the spatial sense. In terms of time, the body has an existence that runs through the individual and even extends further, to his/her “ancestors” (see Foucault, 1984, p. 82; Fujita, 2013, p. 122). In terms of space, the body has an existence that runs through the flesh of an individual and extends further, to the environment that sustains that flesh; namely, “every-thing that touches the body: food, climate, soil” (see Foucault, 1984, p. 83). This means that the extension of the body is identical to the extension of material existence. In Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, genealogy is an analysis of the emergence of confrontation between forces, that is, the domination and subordination of bodies and the confrontations, conflicts, and struggles that produce historical developments and events. Historical developments are thus not considered culminations of historical processes, intentions, or designs; rather, they constitute episodic manifestations of a series of dominations for which no subject may be held responsible (1984, pp. 83–86). According to Hook, Foucault’s use of the genealogy of emergence is meant to prove that it is always produced through a staging of forces. By plotting the interaction and the dynamic struggle of forces waged against one another, he shows that “there are no ‘solid forms’, no stable, crystallized historical moment” (2007, p. 158).

For Nietzsche, there is no such thing as a force separated from its expression:

A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect – more, it is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it). (2000b, p. 481)

He believes that language seduces the popular mind into doubling phenomena. We say “lightning flashes” and think of a neutral substratum (lightning) that performs the activity of flashing. The lightning is thus separated from its flash: “But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything” (2000b, p. 481). In this case, and to grasp a certain amount of reality and to master it, the human brain and body must, according to Nietzsche, be physiologically affected.

Insofar as Nietzsche understood force as something like the fundamental element of the world and the body, it seems that Foucault’s studies resemble Heidegger’s or Deleuze’s studies of Nietzsche. Heidegger gave a series of lectures on Nietzsche in the second half of the 1930s and, after revisions, published it as Nietzsche in 1961. Klossowski translated this into French in 1971. Although Foucault’s studies on Nietzsche do not refer to Heidegger’s work directly, they were contemporary with the acceptance of Heidegger’s work in French. In addition, Deleuze organized a symposium on Nietzsche in Royaumont in 1964, which became an occasion to reevaluate Nietzsche in contemporary French philosophy, and he invited Foucault to it. ¹¹ This opportunity enabled the two to work together as members of the French editorial staff for the new version of the complete works of Nietzsche. ¹²

Dreyfus and Rabinow suggest that what separates Foucault’s thinking on force and power from Nietzsche is that whereas Nietzsche states that we react toward the “will to power,” Foucault “totally depsychologizes this approach [seeing] … all psychological motivation not as the sources but as the result of strategies without strategies” (1982,p. 109). These authors also suggest that Foucault’s power relations remain ever fraught with resistance; there is always a strategic possibility for loosening the hold of a given relation of control. In contrast to Dreyfus and Rabinow, who believe that the will to power does not exist in Foucault’s works, I believe that what they see as resistance in Foucault’s works is a kind of this will, which Foucault, like Nietzsche, believes is imprinted in every individual fighting for his or her freedom and wishes.

Abstraction and alienation: Foucault’s historical approach to psychology in MIP

MIP was the product of an order by Foucault’s Marxist-oriented teacher Althusser. Its 114 pages were published by Presses Universitaires de France in the collection “Philosophical Introduction” (“Initiation philosophique”). In 1962, eight years later and one year after Foucault’s dissertation History of Madness (1961) was published, thebook was reprinted under a new title, Mental Illness and Psychology (Maladie mentale et psychologie; 1962). This new title indicates Foucault’s unwillingness to support his first book until it was thoroughly reedited. The new title, which no longer focuses on the concept of “personality” but rather on the concept of “psychology,” indicates that Foucault’s approach to mental illness had shifted toward a more structural view. In the 1962 edition, Foucault also changed his original sub-title in part two from “The Conditions of Illness” (“Les conditions de la maladie”) to “Madness and Culture” (“Folie et culture”). Foucault’s new theoretical perspective on mental illness was now confusingly similar to his perspectives in HM.

The first part of MIP is influenced by Foucault’s phenomenological interest at that time. Like Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, and the German psychiatrist Jaspers, whom Foucault refers to as a groundbreaking psychiatrist with regard to understanding the human psyche (1962, p. 55), he emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between what can be scientifically explained—that is, our physical observable body—and what cannot be scientifically explained—our mind or our inner psychological feelings and perceptions. He believes we cannot achieve an essential understanding of the human mind by means of observation and abstract medical concepts alone. According to Foucault, one must accept mental illness and the specificity of the morbid (archaic-like) personality as strictly original. He refers to several examples of how one can reach an understanding of the mentally ill person only through phenomenological analysis, by analyzing his/her first-person perspectives, such as those reported in journals and books by the existential psychiatrists Binswanger, Kuhn, Mme. Séchehaye, and Minkowski. In the second part of the book, however, he challenges this phenomenological approach as well as medical psychology by complementing them with dimensions that make mental illness necessary, informative, and historical. Two Nietzschean and diagnostic questions arise: how did our culture come to give mental illness the meaning of deviancy and a status that excludes the mentally ill person? And how, despite that fact, does our society express itself in those morbid forms in which it refuses to recognize itself? (1962, p. 75).

Foucault’s notion is that the concepts used by contemporary psychologists and sociologists to describe mental illness as an abnormality and deviation are projections of a cultural norm that does not see the positive and normal aspects of the disease (1962,p. 30). To answer his questions, he therefore believed one must study the history of alienation in relation to the psychology of alienation. He finds in this history that the Greek concept “energumenos” (the spirit or demon possessed) and the Roman concept “mente captus” (mentacato, the smart), which led the Greeks and Romans to transform people with obvious signs of mental illness into something special and culturally important (1962, pp. 76–77), changed after the Renaissance. In the Protestant arena, it was no longer the body that was to be feared, but the soul, or the devil’s influence on the soul.

Under the guidance of the French physician Pinel at Bicêtre, and by replacing the Greek and Roman concept of a “free” and “good” soul with concepts such as “mercy” and “goodness,” Foucault claims that the mentally ill person’s asocial behavior and incoherent speech is recognized as sick. The mentally ill person is removed from the human community and considered a human abstraction in a society pursuing the concrete. It was this abstraction, according to Foucault, that created the extensive use of internment, which sealed patients’ fates for more than 100 years. This situation was manifested not only in the patient’s alienation but also in all of the patient’s social relations, in all of his experiences, and in all of his existential relations (1962, p. 81). In the dialectic between the modern universal economy and its social bourgeois structure, Foucault sees a paradox in which the sick are made to be strangers and are excluded from the world, the country, and common sense, which, in the community’s eyes, is impaired in the mentally ill person. He suggests that a social evolution was required before the patient’s difficulty with language and dialogue became a mode of interhuman relation:

It was made possible only by a transition from a society immobile in its hierarchy of the moment, which authorises only the order, to a society in which equality of relations made possible and assured potential exchange …. The patient who is incapable of dialogue regresses through this whole social evolution. (1962, p. 28)

Mental illness, Foucault suggests, does not lie in the past, as Freud and others believed, but in the present sociocultural situation, in which the norms of social behavior have become unbearable for the mentally ill person. In the fifth and final chapter of MIP, titled “Conflict Psychology” (“La psychologie du conflit”), several examples from the Russian reflexologist and behaviorist Pavlov are used to explain the Nietzschean notion of the historical power–body conjunction. Foucault considers how the nervous system, in a “natural” and bio-neurological way, transforms sociocultural conflicts and present historical conditions into inner personal life histories, which, in different cases, lead to paradoxical and bodily defensive reactions without necessarily being connected to mental illness. By studying the body as a genealogy of descent within the articulation of the historical power–body conjunction, the body functions as a “surface of inscription of events” and “manifests the stigma of past experience that also gives rise to desires, failings, and errors” (Foucault, 1984, p. 83).

Although scholars such as Dreyfus (1987, p. xxvi) and Rayner (2007, p. 38) claim that Foucault is affected by a materialistic and determinist view, Foucault in MIP criticizes the Marxist materialistic understanding of human behavior. ¹³ Although the mentally ill person is alienated and excluded from social life within modernity, Foucault warns materialists and evolutionary psychology against two mistakes: the first is identifying the disease and psychological conflict with historical contradictions and conditions of possibility; the second is confusing social alienation with insanity. Disease, he says, begins as a functional disorder and must therefore be separated from behavioral differences that are the result of purely environmental causes (1962, pp. 106–107).

Dreams: Foucault’s historical approach to psychology in “Dreams and Existence” (IDE)

Foucault was asked to write the introduction to Binswanger’s essay Le rève et l’existence when he assisted family friend and anesthesia nurse Jacqueline Verdeaux in her efforts to translate it—an introduction that would prove to be nearly twice as long as the text itself (Binswanger, 1954). The work was published by the publishing house Desclée de Brouwer in the collection “Anthropological Texts and Studies” (“Textes et études anthropologiques”). Through Binswanger’s existential-phenomenological methods, Foucault discovered a basic truth about mental illness and human existence that was unrelated to techniques or methods. Binswanger, who was relatively unknown at the time in French psychiatry, was deeply inspired by Freud and Heidegger. His essay is essentially a combination of Freud’s psychoanalysis and Heidegger’s “Daseinanalyse,” but it is also strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas about the relationship between the rational and the irrational, the Apollinaire and the Dionysian. In a later interview, Foucault explains how, as a psychologist in training, he adopted Binswanger’s psychological existentialism:

It was a period when I was working in psychiatric hospitals, and I was looking for something different to counterbalance the traditional grids of the medical gaze. Certainly those superb descriptions of madness as fundamental, unique experiences that could not be superimposed on others were crucial. … I think that existential analysis was useful above all in order better to delimit and circumscribe, academic psychiatric knowledge (savoir), which could be burdensome and oppressive. (Foucault & Trombadori, 1991, pp. 72–73)

As in MIP, Foucault in IDE uses the psychological lower-case p to examine the Nietzschean question of how our present knowledge of dreams and human existence has become so narrow and misinterpreted. He states that his introduction will be an independent text. He wants, as in MIP, to create a new definition of the relationship between symbol (e.g., concepts and expressions) and meaning without falling into psychological or philosophical concepts and explanations. As in MIP, Foucault’s analysis of concept (symbol) and knowledge (meaning) is combined with a historical and sociocultural analysis. He wants to open up and show the other side of the language Nietzsche describes as “the language which seduces the popular mind into doubling phenomena” (2000b, p. 481)—that is, our notion that the relationship between concept and meaning is something fixed and a priori.

To show that rationalism need not be a closed system and that a priori assumptions are subject to change, Foucault returns to the ancient, Renaissance, and Romantic notion of dreams. He shows that in the Romantic period, Novalis and Schelling believed “The world becomes dream, the dream became world, and the outcome in which one believes can be seen coming from afar” (Foucault, 2001a, p. 113). He claims that this epoch-based knowledge opposes any form of psychological positivism à la Freud that contributes to reducing the understanding of Homo Natura (p. 94). He notes that Binswanger’s unique contribution to contemporary psychology is that through the Greco-Roman tradition, he rediscovers rich insights into the content of dreams, making this content non-reductive for psychotherapeutic deduction (p. 109). Like Binswanger, Foucault sees that the content of these non-reductive expressions are explicitly shown in ancient and Romantic lyrics. He refers to several examples in which poetic writers during this era used their dream experiences to explain their existential life polarities in poetic terms.

Foucault’s skepticism toward Freud’s analysis of the past is still present. He believes the essential function of dream analysis is less to revive the past than to make declarations about the future. “Man has known since antiquity,” he writes, “that in dreams he encounters what he is and what he will be, what he has done and what he is going to do, discovering there the knot that ties his freedom to the necessity of the world” (2001a, p. 113). In contrast to Freud and Husserl and contemporary existentialism, such as Heidegger’s ontological “Daseinanalyse,” and in contrast to contemporary evolutionary psychology, Foucault believes that the interpretation of dreams and the interpretation of human existence are related to a method designed to interpret words in a language with unknown grammar: “It becomes a method of cross-referencing of the sort used by the archaeologists for a lost language” (“telle qu’en utilise l’archéologue pour les langues perdues”; 2001a, p. 99). According to Basso (2012), what Foucault means by archeology here involves the way phenomena change historically and how to account philosophically for the historicity of experience in a way that should keep to the givenness of experience itself. With reference to Foucault’s works The Archeology of Knowledge and Birth of the Clinic, Basso states, “As Foucault explains in his Birth of the Clinic, archaeology presents itself as an epistemology that ‘defines not the mode of knowledge, but the world of objects to be known’” (2012, p. 175).

We are not speaking of a scientific and accurate epistemology but of a method of probabilistic confirmation, as in the deciphering of secret codes, a method of meaningful coinciding, as in the most traditional art of divination. In regard to lived experience, space, and time, as an object to be known, ceases, as in dreams and mental illness, to function as a divider that scientifically and methodically dissociates one thing from another; it is no more than the movement of shapes and sounds that come and go according to the flux and reflux of their appearance. Foucault concludes that throughout our lives, we can free the body from the social and cultural restrictions that limit its fundamental experience in which the patient’s own perception of being-in-the-world is defined. By explaining the nature of dreams and imaginations (mental illnesses) in this vein, Foucault describes a functional way out of the confrontation between forces (that is, the domination and subordination of bodies) if one cannot stand against it.

Morale: Foucault’s historical approach to psychology in the 1960s

Unlike Foucault’s 1954 works, Nietzsche’s genealogical perspectives are explicitly expressed in Foucault’s prologue to the 1961 first edition of HM (1961b). Here, Foucault presents his historical views of mental illness as an investigation “under the sun of the great Nietzschean inquiry” (Foucault, 2001a, pp. 189–190; Nietzsche, 2000b)—specifically, Nietzsche’s inquiry into the birth and death of tragedy as outlined in his book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik). In this book, Nietzsche asserts that by affirming “aesthetic Socratism’s” equation of morality, intelligibility, and beauty, Euripides destroyed the Greek tragedy and reduced the tragic character of human existence to its intelligible components by moralizing it. Foucault’s new key insight is that mental illness can be examined only on the horizon of moralization (Nietzsche, 2000a).

Reading the history of psychology and psychiatry through the concept of “morale” and the meaning of moralization presents a different historical view than Foucault’s works from 1954, in which his key concepts were “abstraction,” “alienation,” and “dreams.” ¹⁴ He also replaces the concept of “mental illness” with the concept of “madness” (“folie”). According to Canguilhem, ¹⁵ the book was not really about mental illness at all—“it is, rather, about the philosophical value accorded to the lives, utterances, and work of artists and thinkers conventionally deemed ‘mad’” (in Miller, 1993, p. 103). Foucault himself suggests that the concepts of “mental illness” and “madness” point to two different configurations that met and confounded each other from the 7th century on. Although he believes that the modern, well-controlled, technical hospital will rob mental illness of its terrifying edge, his notion is that the philosophical problem of madness and of unreason will nevertheless persist (in Miller, 1993, p. 104).

Although Foucault never explicitly uses the term “genealogy” to describe his historical and philosophical view of psychiatry and psychology in HM, he later refers to HM as “a genealogy of psychiatry” (1980, p. 64). In an interview cited in Power/Knowledge, he says that he has not attempted an archeology of history:

If one wanted to do a correct, clean, conceptually aseptic kind of history, then that would be a good method. But if one is interested in doing historical work that has political meaning, utility and effectiveness, then this is possible only if one has some kind of involvement with the struggles taking place in the area in question. I tried to do a genealogy of psychiatry because I had had a certain amount of practical experience in psychiatric hospitals and was aware of the combats, the lines of force, tensions and points of collision which existed there. My historical work was undertaken only as a function of those conflicts. The problem and the stake there was the possibility of a discourse which would be both true and strategically effective, the possibility of a historical truth which could have a political effect. (Foucault, 1980, p. 64)

At the time of HM’s publication, Foucault seems to have changed from seeing mental illness as a functional and partly curable illness to believing that “la folie n’existe que dans une société” (“Madness exists only in society”; Foucault, 1961b, p. 9). With reference to the discussion in the introduction chapter, in HM, Foucault finds it problematic that physicians with an interest in the history of medicine love to play at trying to identify the real diseases that lurked behind classical descriptions by asking questions such as whether, when Boerhaaver spoke of mania, he was not describing paranoia. According to Foucault, this is not history. He believes that “perhaps from one century to another the same name does not refer to the same diseases – but this is because fundamentally it is not the same disease that is in question” (1961/1972, p. 274). Whenever medical texts in the classical age speak of madness or even explicitly of “mental illness,” Foucault suggests that what is referred to is neither a series of psychological troubles nor spiritual facts that stand in opposition to the domain of organic pathology. ¹⁶

Believing, like Richards (2010), that the psychology with a lower-case p and the Psychology with an upper-case P represent two different things, in HM, Foucault suggests that madness has only recently attained its status as mental illness. He admits that his analysis moves within a difficult area. As in MIP and IDE, he problematizes the relationship between concept (symbol) and meaning, believing that we must relinquish contemporary concepts of psychology and its claims as a provider of knowledge. As in his former work, but more explicitly expressed, Foucault’s goal is to identify the historical moment when reason separated from unreason and the lunatic lost his crucial social role. Examining what he believes to be three main historical transitional phases (i.e., the transition between the late Middle Ages/Renaissance [1400–1500], Classicism [1600–1700], and Modernity [1800–1900]), he finds that this historical moment occurred when the language and concepts used to discuss the solidarity between sick and healthy, unreason and reason, disappeared during classicism and modernity (Foucault, 2001a, pp. 187–188). From this time, any attempt to express a unity between sick and healthy was silenced, making modern psychiatry possible.

Without referring to Foucault’s 1954 works, Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) and Derrida (1967) challenge Foucault’s attempt to identify and deconstruct cotemporary and earlier connections between concept and meaning and his choice to write a history of madness itself by revealing the moment when reason separates from unreason. They believe that Foucault ignores the fact that he himself is part of a cultural context and practices that produce and influence what he can see and interpret.

Rose argues that HM is not a history of madness itself; rather, it is a book that seeks to describe the historical ensemble that brings modern perception and the experience of the territory of psychiatry into existence (1992, p. 143). In the preface to the French 1972 edition of HM, Foucault states that it would be impossible to write a history of madness itself because the perception that seeks to seize the mentally ill in their wild state necessarily belongs to a world that has already captured them (1961/1972, pp. 9–11). As we have seen, in the beginning of the book, Foucault clarifies that he moves within a difficult area and that one cannot read what Richards (2010) calls psychology with a lower-case p using concepts from Psychology with an upper-case P. Although Foucault cannot escape his time and culture, I nevertheless believe he justifies his arguments and interpretations in a credible way by referring to empirical examples. Looking back at psychology with a lower-case p, Foucault sees, as in his former works, that madness was allowed free rein throughout the Renaissance; it circulated throughout society, forming part of the background and language of everyday life. It was an everyday experience that should neither be exalted nor controlled. The landmark was 1656—the most dramatic transition in the age of classicism and internment—the date of the decree establishing the Hôpital Général for the sake of the poor.

Unlike his former works, in which Foucault claimed that it was abstract medical concepts that affected the “modern” experience of mental illness, Foucault suggests in HM that the hospital had nothing to do with medicine; instead, it was related to moral order. Referring to typical medical and political writings, he sees that the new experience of morale manifested theologically, politically, and economically. In the theological milieu associated with Luther and Calvin, the theological understanding of both poverty and charity underwent a radical transformation. Poverty changed from a religious experience that sanctified it to a moral conception that condemned it (1961/1972, p. 85ff).

As in his 1954 works, Foucault is concerned with the examination of emergence—that is, the historical developments that are conceptualized as transitory manifestations and the relationship of the domination and subordination of the underlying forces. Politically, Foucault believes that a new sensibility of poverty emerged that corresponded to a theological transformation. A new consciousness of one’s duties to society arose, and the poor and mad seemed to be an effect of disorder. Madness, through its association with poverty in the houses of confinement, was formed and constituted as a moral problem (1961/1972, p. 89). Consequently, the physician in Pinel’s asylum served the moral and social order, not the medical order: “If the medical profession is required, it is as a juridical and moral guarantee, not in the name of science” (1961/1972, p. 624).

In the final chapter, “The anthropological circle” (“Le cercle anthropologique”), Foucault argues, as in IDE, that what madness says about itself in the 19th century is what dreams says in their untidy images in the Romantic era: a truth about man that is very close to subjectivity and the birth and existence of individuality. He reminds us that what characterizes the language of madness   is that it exposes elementary, primitive human desires and mechanisms and shows how far modern society has been able to remove itself from the true nature of man.

Power: Foucault’s historical approach to psychiatry in the 1970s

In the early 1970s, many of Foucault’s historical and philosophical views that were presented in the 1950s and 1960s were present in his lectures about psychiatric power. Nevertheless, by again changing his primary concepts, he once more changed his view of the history and philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. Foucault delivered his series of lectures on Le pouvoir psychiatrique at the Collège de France between November 7, 1973 and February 6, 1974. In contrast to his earlier works, in which Foucault read the history of psychology and psychiatry as a history of abstraction, alienation, dreams, and morale, he now attempted to reinterpret this history with the aid of military concepts. He states:

What I would like to do this year is basically a history of these psychiatric scenes. … The game of power which is sketched out, should be analysed before any institutional organization, or discourse of truth, or importation of models. … It seems to me that if we want to produce a true history of psychiatry … it will be by situating it in this series of scenes – scenes of the ceremony of sovereignty, of rituals of service, of judicial procedures, and of medical practices – and not by making the analysis of the institution the essential point and our point of departure. Let’s be really anti-institutionalist. What I propose to bring to light this year is, before analysis of the institution, the microphysics of power. (Foucault, 2003, pp. 33–34)

Foucault makes it clear in his opening lecture that HM must be regarded as the starting point for his lectures, despite the fact that over the years his thinking has undergone a significant number of theoretical and conceptual changes (2003, p. 14). This assertion can be understood in a number of ways. In the period between HM and the lectures, Foucault had systematically and clearly begun to describe his work as genealogical. During the lectures, he says that he intends to correct what he perceives to be the weaknesses of HM, particularly the book’s final chapter, which discusses institutional power (pouvoir asilaire). Foucault’s new military concepts contribute to his development of different perspectives in PP from those of MIP, IDE, and HM. He wants to move from an analysis of representations to an analysis of power, from an analysis of violence to an analysis of the microphysics of power, and from an analysis of institutional regularity to “dispositions” du pouvoir (2003, pp. 14–18). ¹⁷

Similar to his earlier works, Foucault is skeptical of the use of sociological and psychological concepts, believing, like Nietzsche (see 2000b, p. 481), that these concepts seduce the popular mind into doubling phenomena that would put him on the wrong track and hinder him from describing psychiatric praxis as it actually manifested in the 18th and 19th centuries. He argues that psychiatry did not develop from the acquisition of knowledge about mental illness, as is often claimed in 18th- and 19th-century texts, or from moralization, as he himself claimed in HM; instead, it developed from military and disciplinary asymmetrical power mechanisms that were forced upon the mad in what Foucault terms a battlefield.

With reference to psychology with a lower-case p and Psychology with an upper-case P, Foucault distinguishes between two types of power: “the macrophysics of sovereignty,” meaning physical and hierarchical power with explicit signs and symbols found in post-feudal and pre-industrial governments (2003, p. 28), and “the microphysics of disciplinary power,” meaning invisible and camouflaged power found in the emerging industrial society. It manifests in human science and early 19th-century proto-psychiatric practice, or what Foucault in MIP sees as the emergence of a society in which equality or relationships facilitate and ensure potential social exchanges. As mentioned, in MIP, Foucault believed that a social evolution was required before language and dialogue became a mode of interhuman relation: “the patient who is incapable of dialogue regresses through this whole social evolution” (1961, p. 28). The same historical explanation is made in HM when Foucault refers to the great internment, which enfolded and juxtaposed in its confines poverty, insanity, and multiple forms of unreasonable, scandalous, and disorderly individuality embodied both in an economic policy and a conception of the state’s policing interest in public morality. ¹⁸ In PP, Foucault claims that the asylum is, in reality, an area governed by an asymmetric power—that is, the emergence of confrontation between forces, the domination and subordination of bodies, which produce historical developments and events that are inscribed in the doctor’s own body. Similar to Nietzsche’s genealogical notion of the historical power–body conjunction and similar to his own reflexological notions in MIP, where Foucault shows how the nervous system in a “natural” and bio-neurological way transforms sociocultural conflicts and present historical conditions into inner personal life histories (1961a, pp. 92–93), Foucault’s new military concepts enable him to understand Pinel’s psychiatric treatment as an order that surrounds, penetrates, and works its way into the bodies of the patients. This order is visible on the surface but simultaneously leaves permanent traces in the nerves, or in what the lawyer Servan, in 1767, termed the “soft fibers of the brain” (Foucault, 2003, p. 4). ¹⁹

This is an order with internal and external control mechanisms, one that sneaks into patients’ experiences just as microorganisms do. Control appears as a natural and meaningful whole because it is experienced in patients’ physical bodies and mental cognitions. Foucault’s Nietzschean notion is that our physical bodies constitute surfaces to be penetrated and volumes to be worked on. What we have in the asylum is, in reality, a battlefield upon which the patient and psychiatrist confront each other (2003, p. 8). Before knowledge of illness and treatment, it must first and foremost be about winning a victory.

Using what seems to be a Nietzschean view of “Ursprung” as something directed toward “that which was already there” without falling into the metaphysical notion that there exists something timeless and essentially secret, Foucault ends his series of lectures by suggesting that power relations were the a priori of psychiatric practice in the 18th and 19th centuries. First, they conditioned how the asylum institution functioned; second, they determined the distribution of relationships between individuals within it, which involved the absolute right of non-madness over madness; and third, they governed the forms of medical knowledge and intervention (2003, pp. 350–351). Foucault concludes that it is these three power–knowledge regimes ²⁰ that antipsychiatry undertakes to unravel:

giving the individual the task and right of taking his madness to the limit, of taking it right to the end, in an experience to which others may contribute, but never in the name of power conferred on them by their reason or normality. (2003, p. 351) ²¹

Foucault’s coherent and divergent views on the history and philosophy of psychology

From the 1950s view of mental illness as something that emerged from abstract medical concepts, which contributed to pathologizing and alienating the liberating force of imagination and dreams, in the 1960s, Foucault claimed that it was the tendency to moralize people in the bourgeois economic Protestant structure that led to the need to label people mentally ill. It was not until the early 1970s that Foucault explicitly used the genealogical term “power” to describe what had occurred and developed between people in the first psychiatric scenes.

In an interview with the Italian journalist D. Trombadori, Foucault describes his notions of power as already present in his earlier texts, although he does not explicitly use the term “power”: “If I look today on my past, I recall having thought that I was working essentially on a ‘genealogical’ history of knowledge. But, the true motivation force was really this problem of power” (Foucault & Trombadori, 1991, p. 145). Considering Foucault’s approach to the history and philosophy of psychology in this vein, one can read Foucault’s various but consistent analyses of Pinel’s “humanistic” and psychiatric treatment scenes as an analysis of the positive production of power, understood as a general asymmetry between people or a specific asymmetry between the patient and doctor and between the lunatic and his fellow men.

Foucault’s description of the historical power–body conjunction can be read in an existentialist vein. Seeing the historical body as lived experience, Foucault suggests that as living beings, we are not only marionettes in a reasonable historical development, as posited by Hegel, among others; rather, we are resistant, struggling actors who have an effect on cultural norms and concepts. In regard to the power–body conjunction, I believe Foucault presents an existentialism throughout his career in which subject and object form themselves in transforming each other, both in relation to each other and as functions of each other (2001b, pp. 1451–1452). The same view is present in Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre’s writings. As we have seen, to grasp a certain amount of reality and to master it, the human body must, according to Nietzsche, be physiologically affected (see 2000b, p. 481). In Phenomenology of Perception (2002), Merleau-Ponty describes in detail how the lived body corresponds and reacts upon other bodies as well as its social-cultural environment. Sartre distinguishes in this case between the “body as being for itself,” the “body for other,” and the “ontological body” (2003).

As a supplement to this existentialism, although Foucault in the 1970s did not wish to be associated with the universalism of French structuralism, Foucault’s conceptual analyses from the 1950s on emphasized the importance of structuralism’s linguistic direction and its focus on the relation between things and their linguistic and cultural structures rather than the study of the essence of things themselves. In this analysis, “the doer” is, as Nietzsche states, merely a fiction added to the deed; the deed is everything (2000b, p. 481). Similarly, following in the tradition of Wittgenstein and Austin, Rose (1999) suggests that concepts from a Foucaultian view are more important for what they do than for what they mean. Their value lies in the way in which they are able to provide a purchase for critical thought on particular problems in the present (p. 9).

By referring to concepts and practice in Greco-Roman and Romantic culture (psychology with a lower-case p), I believe that Foucault removes what Gutting calls the “air of necessity” by showing “that the past ordered things quite differently and that the processes leading to our present practices and institutions were by no mean inevitable” (Gutting, 2005, p. 10). By approaching history this way, Foucault simultaneously points toward the future, in that he opens up the freedom of the enhancement of life, and of contemporary psychological and psychiatric practices. According to Rose (1999), it may be useful to read Foucault’s ideas of “government” as presupposing the freedom of the governed: “To govern humans is not to crush their capacity to act, but to acknowledge it and to utilize it for one’s own objectives” (p. 4).

Foucault’s historical and philosophical perspectives, as well as his sociocultural and existentialist view on madness and mental illness, show the importance of combining different perspectives to understand the emergence of today’s psychology as well as the current and future situation. By changing his primary concepts, consciously or unconsciously, Foucault exemplifies throughout his career Nietzsche’s notion that there can be no constants in history, no real and unhistorical essences of psychology, no immobile forms or uninterrupted continuities structuring the past; there can only be conceptual and historical changes. In relation to Nietzsche, he demonstrates that genealogy must be invented anew as primary concepts and situations change. I believe that this intertextual analysis exemplifies how Foucault himself invented a new genealogical approach throughout his career at the same time that it shows his works on the history and philosophy of psychology are, in one way or another, thematically and methodically connected.