Foucault and psychoanalysis: resonances from Hermeneutics of the Subject

• Grant number: 18/23222-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: February 17, 2019
• End date: March 16, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Fundamentals and Assessments in Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Danilo Saretta Verissimo
• Grantee: Samuel Iauany Martins Silva
• Supervisor: Thamy Claude Ayouch
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL-ASSIS). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Assis. Assis , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7, France
• Associated to the scholarship: 17/22169-8 - To bend the force: the conversion to the self (se convertere AD se) at the ethical-aesthetic arrangement of Michel Foucault's thought, BP.MS

Abstract

This research, of a theoretical-conceptual nature, is dedicated to the theory of the Self as approached by Michel Foucault in his late works. In his lectures of the early 1980s at the Collège de France, the process of subjectivation, a conception of modern psychology, is thought from the genealogy of Western ethical techniques, which have been rescued since classical antiquity. The course entitled The Hermeneutics of the Subject, taught in 1982, configures the specific sphere of this research. In it we can see Foucault tacking a dimension of the subjectivity that is insubordinate to the concepts of Knowledge and Power. Our objective of the main project is to analyze the specificities of Foucault's notional use of the descriptive category of the conversion to self, articulating them with the conceptual structure proper to the ethical-aesthetic prism of his thought. One of our specific objectives is to delineate possible echoes of the 1982 course in the formation of psychological ideas and techniques, especially in the modes of practicing the I-Other relationship guided by the idea of truth. From these theoretical points this Stage of Research becomes pertinent. Thus, we will analyze the psychological techniques from the dialogue that Thamy Ayouch makes between Foucault and psychoanalysis. Some questions guide us: how, in comparing Foucault and psychoanalysis about the ways of transforming the subject from the truth and the relation with the other, can we think the foundations and practices of psychology? How can we extract strategic reflections for psychology from The Hermeneutics of the Subject? How can we extract dimensions of approach to psychoanalysis from the Hermeneutics of the Subject? How can we abdicate legal modernity to think of psychic processes? How can we elaborate a kind of subjectivation that dispenses with the recollection of repressed representations? Finally, how can we, starting from Ayouch's work with psychoanalysis, raise questions and glimpse new dimensions within the book The Hermeneutics of the Subject? (AU)