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Foucault on Freud

Reading Question Two: Foucault on Freud

Foucault has a way of taking all of the fun out of sex - even more so than Freud, who had the ability to make each one of us question our own sexuality and to wonder whether any of the things that we wanted to do with our own bodies - or the bodies of others - was in any way actually natural or healthy. But Foucault takes us beyond even the point that Freud was contented to go - and after reading "Scientia Sexualis" it is hard to feel entirely grateful.

This is not to say that Foucault's work is not groundbreaking, as radical in its own way as was Freud's. But the picture that he presents of sexuality is one that is so socially controlled that it is impossible for each one of us to conceive of our sexuality in any but the terms dictated by society. In this sense, Foucault does for sex what Durkheim does for suicide: In both cases the writers force us to consider the ways in which out most intimate actions are neither precisely intimate nor based in freewill but are in fact the product of our society's collective neuroses and sorrows.

Foucault argues that there are five distinct ways in which the traditions of scientific discourse have attempted both to regularize sexuality and at the same time (or perhaps these are the same actions) to distance sexuality, to decorporialize it. The first of these means is "a clinical codification of the inducement to speak". This description of the discourse on sexuality could be (and indeed arguably is) a codification of Freud's methods. For, as we see in the case study of Dora, his modus operandi of curing is based on the process of having people talk about their sexuality in terms of confession. Freud draws out Dora's experiences and emotions as if he were a police detective and she a murder suspect.

Foucault's second comment on the ways in which science talks about sex is that the scientist require that there be "a clinical codification of the indu...

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Foucault on Freud. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:57, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688243.html