2 :: THE REINVENTION OF PERSONS
people narrate their lives. From this perspective, individuals are able to access some
deeper emotional “truth” about their life through a therapeutic dialogue in which
confession (usually confessing to unacceptable sexual desires) is central. Therapy for
Foucault is part and parcel of the rise of “confessional society”:
The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part
in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love
relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the
most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s
thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes
about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most
difficult to tell. (1978:59)In developing this argument Foucault traces a move during the late nineteenth
century in the language of confession away from the Church and onto the
psychoanalyst’s couch, where the worried-well allegedly manufacture new identity
truths through the “talking cure”. “In the Californian cult of the self ”, Foucault
reflected on the rise of therapy culture, “one is supposed to discover one’s true self,
to separate it from what might obscure or alienate it, to decipher its truth thanks to
psychological or psychoanalytic science.”
The “talking cure” of therapy for Foucault fits with a whole gamut of experiences that
he calls “technologies of the self ”. Like prisons or clinics or hospitals, therapies
function to lock the self within the discourses or scripts of what is considered
appropriate behaviour; we relinquish what we might have become in order to fit with
the scripts of who we are supposed to be. Foucault sees therapy, or the Californian
cult of the self, as interwoven with the rise of “disciplinary power”, in which discourse
circulates to regulate the production of “docile bodies”(1978).
Foucault’s account of technologies of the self, as a critique of therapy and the
psy-professions, has been hugely influential in the social sciences and humanities.
And there is much in this account which is compelling, as therapy has undoubtedly
been intricately connected with the production of power and the regulation of
behavioural patterns of individuals in modern societies. That said, there are serious
limitations to Foucault’s analysis of the self (see Elliott 2007). Certainly, Foucault’s
suggestion that therapy has become simply an extension of religious confession is
less than convincing: psychoanalysis, for example, is premised on the notion of a
repressed unconscious, which renders problematic the idea that people can simply
“confess” to the secret promptings of desire. But what I want to focus on here, which
is equally problematic because Foucault does not focus on this point, concerns the