Neuropsychoanalysis and Foucault: Reevaluating Psy-Discipline Practices of the Self

• In Event: Becoming Otherwise: STS Inroads into Techniques of the Better Self - I: Potential

Abstract

This paper puts neuropsychoanalytic work in conversation with one of psychoanalysis’ most trenchant critics, Michel Foucault. I argue that placing Foucault and neuropsychoanalysis in dialogue encourages more productive ways of evaluating psy-discipline informed practices of bettering the self. Much of the “material turn” has critiqued the nature/culture dualism of Western ontologies, a dualism perhaps best exemplified in psychology by the body/mind problem. In the natural sciences this division has already come under a sustained attack from neuroscientists, a development that has been met with a mixture of concerns over the emergence of a powerfully reductive biopolitics (Rose and Abi-Rached 2014; Dumit 2004) and interest in the potential for theorizing embodied mindedness (Wilson 1998, 2004). A number of leading neuroscientists, themselves concerned with the absence of subjective experience in neuroscientific research, have begun advocating for a return to an unexpected source of inspiration – psychoanalysis (Panksepp and Solms 2012; Smith and Solms 2018). In juxtaposing this work with Foucault’s conceptualizations of power/knowledge and subjectivation, this paper raises some preliminary critiques of both neuropsychoanalysis’ materialization of “the soul” and a Foucauldian subject underdetermined by discursive processes. While embedding “the soul” in the brain risks reductively naturalizing subjectivity, it also allows us to challenge a Foucauldian constructivism that casts interiority as a largely negative byproduct of contemporary forms of power/knowledge. By proposing an affective and ecological theory of mind, neuropsychoanalysis offers a non-rationalist and processual account of subjectivity that can remain attuned to subjectivation while also problematizing the interior/exterior dichotomy that so troubled Foucault.

Author

• John Blatzheim, Rice University