Читать книгу The Early Foucault - Stuart Elden - Страница 15

Alongside this work on philosophy, Foucault was also studying psychology. Foucault’s formal teachers included Lagache, who established the diploma in psychology at the Sorbonne and with Jacques Lacan formed the breakaway Société française de psychanalyse in 1953.¹⁰² Lacan pays tribute to Lagache’s work in Écrits, devoting a whole essay to him.¹⁰³ Foucault also attended classes by the neurologist and psychiatrist Ajuriaguerra who was in 1975 elected to a chair at the Collège de France.¹⁰⁴ Of course, not all the influences came from the classroom: Foucault was a voracious reader too. Georges Politzer’s 1928 work, Critique of the Foundations of Psychology, was certainly important.¹⁰⁵ Politzer was a PCF theorist, executed by the Gestapo in 1942, who made one of the few PCF contributions to psychological theory.¹⁰⁶ In the early 1920s Politzer was one of the members of the Philosophies group of whom Georges Friedmann, Norbert Guterman and Lefebvre were also members.¹⁰⁷ Politzer translated Friedrich Schelling’s La Liberté humaine, to which Lefebvre contributed a long introduction – one of his first major publications – in 1926.¹⁰⁸ Politzer is also known for La Crise de la psychologie contemporaine,¹⁰⁹ and was influential to Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and Laplanche.¹¹⁰

Politzer is critical of recent developments in psychology, with an explicit focus on Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams. His key innovation is to critique the distinction between manifest and latent contents of mental life,¹¹¹ and to propose what he calls ‘concrete psychology’. For Politzer there is only one field of consciousness, and he therefore is strongly critical of Freud’s turn to abstraction, his metapsychology, especially in the light of his earlier promise of a more concrete work. Metapsychology detached psychology from empirical evidence, and Politzer is too much of a phenomenologist for that to be valid. ‘Metapsychology has lived its life, and the history of psychology is beginning.’¹¹² Politzer is also critical of the scientific pretensions of modern psychology: ‘We need to understand that psychologists are scientists like evangelized wild tribes are Christian.’¹¹³ The Critique was intended to begin a three-volume study, Matériaux pour la Critique des fondements de psychologie,¹¹⁴ with ‘another volume on Gestalt theory, with a chapter on phenomenology’, and a third on ‘behaviourism and its different forms with a chapter on applied psychology’.¹¹⁵ While this work was cut short by his execution, it would be developed by many who followed his inspiration.

Politzer developed one approach to psychology, in contrast to Ignace Meyerson’s more historical approach.¹¹⁶ Defert claims that Foucault spent time with Meyerson from October 1951 (C 17/17; CH 40), which has been used to argue for the importance of Meyerson for Foucault’s work.¹¹⁷ However, a letter from Foucault to Meyerson from June 1953 requesting a first meeting challenges this chronology.¹¹⁸ A more balanced approach to this relation to contemporary currents in psychology can be found in the unpublished thesis of Alessandro de Lima Francisco.¹¹⁹ In addition, Defert recounts that Pierre Morichau-Beauchant, one of the first French psychoanalysts, and a family friend of the Foucaults, gave Foucault his collection of early psychoanalysis journals in October 1951, shortly before his death and just as Foucault began teaching (C 17/17).

Another key figure in Foucault’s knowledge of psychology was teaching outside the formal university system. While he was still based in Paris, Foucault attended Lacan’s seminar, which was held for two hours on Wednesdays from November to July.¹²⁰ The seminar began in 1951, initially in Lacan’s living room, before moving to the Hôpital Sainte-Anne in late 1953. Lacan was fifty when the seminar began, and there was a lot of clinical and theoretical experience behind it. Lacan’s thesis On Paranoid Psychosis in Relationship to Personality had been published in 1932, and there were other early publications.¹²¹ Écrits begins with a text from 1936, but it is selected writings, not a complete works. As Lacan’s son-in-law and seminar editor, Jacques-Alain Miller, indicates, Lacan believed that his real work began around the time his seminar teaching began: writings before that were its ‘antecedents’.¹²² Hyppolite was an active participant in the 1953–4 seminar.¹²³ Miller notes that Hyppolite was a regular attender, and ‘was quite open-minded at a time when other French philosophers found Lacan too difficult to understand’.¹²⁴

It is worth underlining that Lacan’s seminar was, until the 1960s, simply advertised as ‘Commentaries on the texts of Freud’.¹²⁵ Sigmund Freud had died in 1939, and Lacan begins his seminars only twelve years later. Part of Lacan’s explicit purpose was to return to Freud himself, stripped of some of the intervening years of interpretation and adaptation. As he comments: ‘The meaning [sens] of a return to Freud is a return to Freud’s meaning [sens].’¹²⁶ A crucial text was the 1953 Rome lecture ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, which has been described as ‘for all practical purposes the manifesto of the structuralist reinterpretation of Freud’.¹²⁷

Miller notes that instead of a recording being made, or Lacan’s notes being available for editing, the seminar sessions were recorded in shorthand by a stenographer and then typed up. Copies were made of this typescript, which circulated for several years before Miller began the process of editing the seminars for publication.¹²⁸ But the stenographer only began work when the seminar moved to Sainte-Anne. As a consequence, there are few traces of the first two years’ sessions, looking at Freud’s most famous case studies. In 1953 Lacan indicates that the ‘Wolf Man’ was the focus in the first year (1951–2); the ‘Rat Man’ in the second (1952–3).¹²⁹ In the first year he also discussed the Dora case, but no notes survive.¹³⁰ Miller suggests that ‘Intervention on Transference’ in Écrits contains echoes of this year’s discussion.¹³¹ In the second year Lacan discussed the ‘Wolf Man’ case again, of which some notes are available.¹³² The opening lines of the first session refer back to the Dora case. Unfortunately, no notes on the ‘Rat Man’ discussion have been preserved. However, Lacan’s Paris lecture ‘The Neurotic’s Individual Myth’, which was circulated in unauthorized form from 1953, and finally published in 1978, may draw on material first delivered in this seminar.¹³³ Miller also suggests that the Rome lecture reflects this work.¹³⁴

For his 1953–4 seminar, Lacan discussed ‘Freud’s papers on technique’, and a partial transcript forms the first volume of the published seminars.¹³⁵ Unfortunately almost all of the 1953 material is lost, with the published version really beginning with the 13 January 1954 session. Lacan utilized material from the seminar in some of his other lectures and writings. ‘Variations on the Standard Treatment’ and ‘Introduction and Reply to Hyppolite’ stem directly from this seminar, and were published in 1955 and 1956 but, as Miller has noted, texts from several years later pick up and elaborate on themes discussed in this class. He mentions two: ‘Remarks on Daniel Lagache’ in 1960, and ‘The Mistaking of the Subject Supposed to Know’ from 1968.¹³⁶ In 1954–5 the seminar topic was ‘The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis’.¹³⁷ The two key texts read were Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and ‘The Ego and the Id’.¹³⁸ In these early years Lacan was therefore working through Freud’s texts systematically – beginning with the case studies, moving to the papers on technique, and then material on metapsychology. In 1955–6 he turned to the psychoses, mainly through a reading of the case of Judge Schreber.¹³⁹

Maurice Pinguet notes that Foucault went every week to hear Lacan, and a diary entry suggests this began in 1951.¹⁴⁰ Pinguet was a friend of Foucault from their days at the ENS, who moved to Japan in the 1950s (C 17/17; 22/24).¹⁴¹ He adds that Foucault also attended the seminars when they moved to Sainte-Anne, and explicitly mentions the theme of the papers on technique.¹⁴² While Lacan’s seminar continued, with some disruptions, and several changes of venue, until shortly before his death, Foucault stopped attending when he went to Uppsala in 1955 (DE#281 IV, 58; EW III, 258). The first two published seminars, and the traces of the two previous years, are therefore the most relevant for looking at the exposure Foucault had to his ideas. It is notable that while Lacan regularly asks attendees to comment or contribute to the seminar, Foucault is not called upon in extant materials. Of course, at the time Foucault was only in his mid to late twenties and hardly well known.

Foucault’s attendance from the beginning means that, in Macey’s words, that he was ‘one of the first to bring to the rue d’Ulm news of the ‘return to Freud’, or in other words of Lacan’s reformulation of psychoanalytic principles in the light of modern linguistics, anthropology and philosophy and of his dismissal of the ‘ego-psychology’ which, he claimed was reducing psychoanalysis to a ‘banal psycho-social engineering’.¹⁴³ In particular, while his own work was informed by Heidegger, Lacan took a clear distance from the existential psychotherapy movement. This was not always the case. In 1932, not long after completing his doctoral dissertation, Lacan sent an article to Binswanger dedicated to him.¹⁴⁴

While Foucault attended at least some sessions, and clearly read some of Lacan’s work from quite early on, his attitude seems ambivalent.¹⁴⁵ Pinguet says that Foucault admired Lacan enormously, and recalls a conversation around 1953 in which Foucault told him that ‘in psychoanalysis today it is only Lacan who is of importance!’¹⁴⁶ Yet Macey interviewed Jacqueline Verdeaux for his biography, and reports her view that Foucault ‘had little sympathy for Lacan’s overall project and poured scorn on his philosophical pretensions. The psychoanalyst’s pilgrimage to see Heidegger in Freiburg in 1950 provoked great mirth on Foucault’s part, as well as some very disparaging comments on Lacan’s philosophical competence in unpublished letters to Verdeaux.’¹⁴⁷ Her husband Georges Verdeaux had produced a thesis under Lacan’s supervision in 1944.¹⁴⁸ Nonetheless, Foucault could be more positive, such as in the Binswanger introduction (DE#1 I, 73; DIE 37–8). In 1961, he said that while French psychoanalysis had initially been ‘strictly orthodox’, more recently it had ‘taken on a second and more prestigious life, due as you know, to Lacan’ (DE#5 I, 168; FL 8).

Foucault’s early publications have only limited relation to what he heard in these seminars. Maladie mentale et personnalité was completed in late 1953, and the Binswanger introduction over Easter 1954. As Chapter 4 will note, there is one indication in the introduction of something he probably heard in a seminar; and Chapter 3 notes how Lacan may have influenced the reading of Freud in Maladie mentale et personnalité. Foucault’s relation to Lacan will be discussed further in The Archaeology of Foucault.

Yet perhaps the most significant early influence in psychology comes from a figure who might be thought to play a more important role in Foucault’s understanding of philosophy, Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty had made his reputation with The Phenomenology of Perception, his 1945 primary thesis.¹⁴⁹ But Merleau-Ponty’s secondary thesis, The Structure of Behaviour [comportement] was actually published first, in 1942, and was perhaps more significant for Foucault.¹⁵⁰ As the book begins, Merleau-Ponty states that his ‘goal is to understand the relations between consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social. By nature we understand here a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of causality.’¹⁵¹ Yet Merleau-Ponty does not structure his enquiry on the basis of a subject who perceives, but grounds it on the basis of the psychological and biological research of the time. However, his argument is that the Gestalt theorists did not fully appreciate the consequences of their research. In demonstrating that even the simplest experience was structured by an underlying form, rather than learned, their work fundamentally challenged knowledge and being. What is clear from both these early works is that scientific research provides a rich resource for his enquiries. Biology and psychology, especially, can be used to resource his philosophical enquiry. While he does not use them as a foundational basis, nor does he share Heidegger’s critical position that ‘no result of any science can ever be applied immediately to philosophy’.¹⁵² In the Preface to the second edition Alphonse de Waelhens explains Merleau-Ponty’s distance from Heidegger: ‘But in Being and Time one does not find thirty lines concerning the problem of perception; one does not find ten concerning that of the body.’¹⁵³ For Foucault, studying both psychology and philosophy, the rich interrelation of these themes in Merleau-Ponty’s work was clearly appealing.

In a wide-ranging 1978 interview with the Italian Marxist Duccio Trombadori Foucault notes the Hegelian influence of Wahl and Hyppolite, but suggests Merleau-Ponty was something more than that. He was both ‘a meeting point between the academic philosophical tradition and phenomenology’, but also took this work into a range of related fields, including ‘the intelligibility of the world, the real’ (DE#281 IV, 48; EW III, 247). Later in the same interview he expands: ‘A whole aspect of phenomenology took the form of an interrogation of science, in its foundation, its rationality, its history. The great texts of Edmund Husserl, of Alexandre Koyré, formed the other face of phenomenology, opposite the more existential phenomenology of the lived [le vécu] . . . In many respects, the work of Merleau-Ponty was an attempt to recapture the two dimensions of phenomenology’ (DE#281 IV, 53; EW III, 252). A few years earlier he had told Mauriac of his ‘fascination’ with him.¹⁵⁴

A wide range of Merleau-Ponty’s lecture courses are published, some of which Foucault attended. Merleau-Ponty’s 1947–8 course Malebranche, Biran and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul was delivered both at the University of Lyon and the ENS.¹⁵⁵ The published edition is based on the Paris lectures, using audience notes because the original manuscript is missing. In the second edition, these notes are compared to those from Lyon by Michel Jouhaud, which shows that it was essentially the same course. Foucault attended in Paris, and Jacques Taminiaux tells the story of being told about the course by a friend, who said his own notes were ‘imprecise and not very legible’, and suggested that he speak to Foucault instead. Taminiaux says that Foucault ‘very graciously loaned me his notebook of lecture notes which were indeed very clear and detailed’. Taminiaux says that the notes were much read, but not copied by him, and so he was sorry when Foucault asked to retrieve the notes, something he suggests shows ‘how important and inspiring these lectures were for him’.¹⁵⁶

Reading the course now it is hard to see what inspired Foucault so much. The course was written to link three thinkers who were on the curriculum for the agrégation that year. The topic of the body–soul relation was one that Merleau-Ponty had discussed in both The Structure of Behaviour and The Phenomenology of Perception and, while he was bound by the constraints of the curriculum, he nonetheless puts plenty of himself into the material. One crucial theme is the discussion of extension, and the critique of Descartes’s understanding of space.¹⁵⁷ This, as in Merleau-Ponty’s wider work, is challenged by a corporeal spatiality.¹⁵⁸ Foucault later recalls that it was in 1948 that Merleau-Ponty began engaging with Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on linguistics; a theme that continues into his later courses.¹⁵⁹ Foucault’s interest at this time was quite different from the History of Madness. While that became his eventual doctoral thesis, his first, abandoned thesis was on the philosophy of psychology (see Chapter 2).

Merleau-Ponty taught at the Sorbonne from 1949–52, as Professor of Child Psychology and Pedagogy, succeeding Jean Piaget. Merleau-Ponty’s eight courses there concentrated on themes within the remit of his chair, from the consciousness and acquisition of language to their relation to others and the adult’s view of the child. Only one course was on a theme directly related to his better-known research interests – ‘The Human Sciences and Phenomenology’. Student notes from these lectures were transcribed, and approved by Merleau-Ponty for publication. They appeared in the University of Paris’s Bulletin de psychologie, and then in various collected editions.¹⁶⁰ Foucault references some of these in an unpublished manuscript on Merleau-Ponty (see Chapter 4).¹⁶¹ Some of the courses were translated into English in book form or in collections, before the definitive edition was translated entire.¹⁶²

Merleau-Ponty was elected to the Collège de France in 1952, where he gave a sequence of courses on themes including the world, language, speech, institution, passivity, nature, ontology and philosophy today.¹⁶³ These courses were brought to an abrupt end with his premature death at the age of fifty-three on 3 May 1961, just over two weeks before Foucault’s thesis defence. For much of Merleau-Ponty’s Collège de France career then, Foucault was outside France. Foucault could have attended Merleau-Ponty’s earliest courses there, but there is no indication that he did. In his inaugural course The Sensible World and the World of Expression from 1953, Merleau-Ponty explores ideas about space, time, the body and perception, which connect back to his Sorbonne lectures, but also to Foucault’s own research interests at the time.¹⁶⁴ Merleau-Ponty shows how behavioural psychology and Gestalt theory can provide empirical background for thinking about fundamental questions of the relation of the subject and the world. There can be no fixed division between material things in the sensible world and cultural things of the world of expression.¹⁶⁵

Through his years at the Sorbonne and Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty published several other works, which tended to be works of political theory or collections of essays on art and other themes, rather than major philosophical works like his first two books. These later books include Humanism and Terror and Adventures of the Dialectic, and Sense and Non-Sense and Signs. Two incomplete manuscripts were published posthumously: The Prose of the World and The Visible and the Invisible.¹⁶⁶ Many assessments of Foucault and Merleau-Ponty concentrate on the books, and draw contrasts between a thinker in the phenomenological tradition, and one who sought to move beyond it.¹⁶⁷ Indeed, Foucault sometimes uncritically groups Merleau-Ponty with Sartre as representatives of a tradition from which he wished to disassociate himself (i.e. DE#55 I, 662; FL 55; DE#109 II, 372; FL 98; DE#361 IV, 764; EW II, 467). But Merleau-Ponty’s lectures bridging psychology and philosophy are arguably more significant for Foucault’s early development.