Foucault on psychoanalysis : missed encounter or Gordian knot?

Foucault’s remarks concerning psychoanalysis are ambivalent and even prima facie contradictory, at times lauding Freud and Lacan as anti-humanists, at others being severely critical of their imbrication within psychiatric power. This has allowed a profusion of interpretations of his position, between so-called ‘Freudo-Foucauldians’ at one extreme and Foucauldians who condemn psychoanalysis as such at the other. In this article, I begin by surveying Foucault’s biographical and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis and the secondary scholarship on this relationship to date. I pay particular attention to the discussion of the relationship in feminist scholarship and queer theory, and that by psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as attending to the particular focus in the secondary literature on Foucault’s late work and his relationship to the figure of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Foucault’s attitude to psychoanalysis varies with context, and that some of his criticisms of psychoanalysis in part reflect an ignorance of the variety of psychoanalytic thought, particularly in its Lacanian form. I thus argue that Foucault sometimes tended to overestimate the extent of the incompatibility of his approach with psychoanalytic ones and that there is ultimately no serious incompatibility there. Rather, psychoanalysis represents a substantively different mode of inquiry to Foucault’s work, which is neither straightforwardly exclusive nor inclusive of psychoanalytic insights.