Extract
[...] Even for psychoanalysts.'15. Because delivering the word of the Unconscious is to destroy the rigid structures of the Superego, comparable to the established order within societies: The language of the Unconscious being that of desire and knowing that every established order comes to hinder access to the object of desire, it seems unthinkable that psychoanalysis, the practice that aims to let the Unconscious express itself, could tie itself against it by hindering it even further. However, psychoanalysis does not exclude the existence of a kind of power drive (the Freudian term 'Bemächtigungstrieb'16). [...]
[...] It is to this body that Foucault seems to assimilate psychoanalysis, understanding it then as an institutional practice. Foucault continues:Towards the doctor, Freud slid all the structures that Pinel and Tuke had arranged in the internment ». Through these statements, Foucault at least makes Freud a complice, at worst the successor of the practices of Pinel and Tuke, such as the proposal of panoptical architectures in psychiatric hospitals. This type of architecture allowed a single guard to observe all the cells under his surveillance. [...]
[...] According to Foucault, what is noted in his iconography is that madness has become a temptation because in it resides an obscure, hermetic, esoteric knowledge. Madness becomes the tragic consciousness of Man, of his animality, of his finitude, of the Apocalypse. In this case, madness possesses everything: The esoteric knowledge, the knowledge of the finitude of Man. Language is the place of critical consciousness. Madness is no longer the knowledge about Man and his finitude: Here, it possesses nothing, no knowledge, it pushes towards what is "easy, joyful, light in the world""22. [...]
[...] History of Madness in the Classical Age - Michel Foucault (1961) - Is Foucault's critique representative of what psychoanalysis really is as a thought and practice? Psychoanalytic Reflection on Clinical and Political Issues (Discourse, Forms, and Practices) Duty of Psychoanalysis SUBJECT: Based on your readings and experience, but focusing your argument on the proposed excerpt for commentary, you will attempt to respond to Foucault's affirmation: "He has shifted onto himself, onto this single presence, evaded behind the patient and above him, in an absence that is also total presence, all the powers that had been distributed in the collective existence of the asylum; he has made it the Absolute Gaze, the Pure Silence and always retained, the judge who punishes and rewards in a judgment that does not even condescend to language; he has made it the mirror in which madness, in a movement almost immobile, falls in love and falls out of love with itself. [...]
[...] This criticism joins that of the psychoanalyst who expressed himself on the subject of his reading of the work 'At the Heart of the Economy, the Unconscious': « Your book is very interesting, but what bothers me is this notion of power drive? It's the term of drive associated with power that I find strange? But then, it's weird, this drive? From which part of the body would it come from? I'm embarrassed by this notion, it's too practical: We can do anything with that ?9. [...]
