Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with Psychoanalysis

Whitebook, Joel

doi:10.1017/ccol0521840821.012

Cited by 16 publications

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“…He studied under Canguilhem but such scholars as Bachelard shaped his early interests too. We also know that at that time Foucault was ‘severely depressed’ and that his father arranged a psychiatric consultation for him (Whitebook, 2003: 315). As a student, Foucault was a friend of Althusser who influenced him to join the French Communist Party in 1950.…”

Section: Intellectual Performances In Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More than any specific cultural or ideological allegiance, which he seems to have regarded skeptically early on, it was the ‘polluting’ of and dramatized opposition to academic icons of his time that were his weapon of choice. His polemical pursuit was a negative response to the dominance of existentialism and the broad dissatisfaction with ‘old academism’ (Whitebook, 2003: 314). Interestingly enough, he launched his intellectual onslaughts not from philosophical but theoretical literary positions.…”

Section: Intellectual Performances In Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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How to become an iconic social thinker

Bartmański

2012

European Journal of Social Theory

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The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronisław Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification.

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Section: Intellectual Performances In Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Intellectual Performances In Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to become an iconic social thinker

Bartmański

2012

European Journal of Social Theory

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“…It is in the 'zone of occult instability' that intellectuals can be fruitful, in rethinking the spaces and interstices within their own roles, in teaching, in writing, in research, in organisational activity and, significantly, in theoretical activity. Translated into another Foucauldian language, the new space is to be found within the dialogue between Reason and Madness, between intellectuals and their own Otherings (Whitebook, 2005).…”

Section: Fanon's Intellectualmentioning

confidence: 99%

The seductions of determinism in development theory: Foucault's functionalism

Graaff¹

2006

Third World Quarterly

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“…62 So Foucault's diatribe against moral treatment contains a kernel of truth, encased in a Dionysian fantasy of madness as untamed libido and psychotherapy as inherently carceral -a 'confinement without confinement' as Derrida later described psychoanalysis. 63 But one does not need to be mad, or to be a card-carrying Freudian, to know that madness is at bottom a self-incarceration. The therapeutic relationship that Foucault excoriates may not be as gentle or ethically unambiguous as the moral therapists imagined (or as transcendently illuminating as some psychoanalytic enthusiasts fondly believe), but the guilt and pain that it releases are the patient's own; what Foucault derides as the 'miracle cure' of the disclosed self has nothing miraculous about it.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Demise of the Asylum in Late Twentieth-Century Britain: A Personal History

Taylor¹

2011

Trans. R. Hist. Soc.

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Mental health care in Britain was revolutionised in the late twentieth century, as a public asylum system dating back to the 1850s was replaced by a community-based psychiatric service. This paper examines this transformation through the lens of an individual asylum closure. In the late 1980s, I spent several months in Friern mental hospital in north-east London. Friern was the former Colney Hatch Asylum, one of the largest and most notorious of the great Victorian ‘museums of the mad’. It closed in 1993. The paper gives a detailed account of the hospital's closure, in tandem with my personal memories of life in Friern during its twilight days. Friern's demise occurred in an ideological climate increasingly hostile to welfare dependency. The transfer of mental health care from institution to community was accompanied by a new ‘recovery model’ for the mentally ill which emphasised economic independence and personal autonomy. Drawing on the Friern experience, the paper concludes by raising questions about the validity of this model and its implications for mental healthcare provision in twenty-first century Britain.

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Against Interiority: Foucault’s Struggle with Psychoanalysis

Cited by 16 publications

References 0 publications

How to become an iconic social thinker

How to become an iconic social thinker

The seductions of determinism in development theory: Foucault's functionalism

The Demise of the Asylum in Late Twentieth-Century Britain: A Personal History

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