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

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historical vantage point (and with the advantage of knowing something about feminist discourse) we might well argue that Dora's hysteria is not the hysteria at all and certainly does not arise from any shame over sexuality but rather from her social imprisonment in a patriarchy. Dora seems in fact to know at least something about sex (for example, she seems to know what oral sex is); rather it is Freud's assessment of her knowledge and condition that deny a knowledge of human sexuality. It is this aspect of the case study of Dora that leads us to Foucault's fourth point, which is that the "truth" of the sexual confession lies not so much in the confession itself but in the interpretation (by the scientist, by the expert) of that confession. Finally, Foucault argues that there is a "medicalization" of the effects of the confession. Freud sees Dora's symptoms as symptoms, her condition as treatable. While we have now normalized this idea into the widespread practice of therapy, in fact the idea that sexuality is something to be cured indicates a fundamental medicalization of desire. Writing Question Two: Foucault Foucault, as is the case of any good postmodernist, is not fundamentally concerned with being clear in his writing.

Category: Philosophy - F