Freud,His Illness,and Ourselves

The history of Freud's illness shows that he tried to avoid confrontation with it, and to treat it as unimportant. In his personal letters, the ill body remains outside-as another person, "Konrad," not he himself-and it is not taken into account. Particularly in Freud's correspondence with Ferenczi, we realize to what extent certain phenomena, especially depressive ones, he considered somatic, with a tendency to dismiss them, and this despite important occasional insights, such as about the role played by hate in psychosomatic illnesses. In the post-Freudian development, these topics have been more and more integrated in the dialogue, in the discourse between the analyst and the analysand.     

Foucault,Freud, and the Repressive Hypothesis

One aspect of Foucault's thought brings him much closer to Freud than many commentators believe. This Freudian “moment” in Foucault is formulated in the following dictum: the soul is the prison of the body. For Foucault, the modern soul is formed when the norms that govern disciplinary training and exercise are internalized. Once internalized, these norms affect our self-understanding and conduct. This paper focuses on Foucault's account of internalization. It shows that this Freudian moment in Foucault mitigates his criticisms of the repressive hypothesis, but it also suggests a conception of interiority that can be interpreted as the modern instantiation of the rapport à soi.