The history of the self is now high-profile. In this atmosphere, contemporary French philosopher Marcel Gauchet's long-developing and surprisingly neglected version of this history deserves much more attention than it has received. Like all other such recent enterprises, Gauchet's account is best seen in the broad aftermath of Michel Foucault's work, which in retrospect simply invented the field, even if many entrants into it—Charles Taylor is another good example—have intended profound criticisms of Foucault even as they ventured into the territory he cleared. Gauchet's central claim is that the history of the self should, most fundamentally, chart the rise in the experience of and belief in constitutive internal discord, and the dependence of modern self-possession on self-alienation. A reconstruction of this argument is useful because of its intrinsic interest and its comparative distinction, while its historical contextualization casts much new light on French developments in the last few decades.

The focus of Gauchet's account is, I think, a crucial one that ought to be central to the history of the self, whether it is an experiential history addressing revolutions in agency or an intellectual history targeting theory change. Far more than any competitors in the field, Gauchet's central aim has been to follow the invention of a divided self “not master in its own house” (as Sigmund Freud famously described the ego). In Gauchet's narrative, more exactly, the history of the modern self is the creation of inexpungeable alterity in the self (or the invention of the unconscious) while the history of the modern theory of the self is the recognition of this alterity in the self (or the discovery of the unconscious). Far from being inaugurated with the rationalist exclusion of madness, as Foucault claimed, modernity starts, for Gauchet, with the relaxation of the difference between normal selfhood and delirious otherness—a point of beginning that would eventually allow the psychoanalytic discovery that every self is, in part, other. One might want to present Gauchet on the model of G. W. F. Hegel, for whom subjectivity is in evolutionary motion in modernizing historical processes, which only concludes with analytical understanding of that evolution. Except that for Gauchet, the endpoint of modern processes is not self-reconciliation and recognition of it, but very nearly the opposite: self-alienation and recognition of it.

A main reason to include Gauchet's work in the same framework as more familiar interventions—besides Taylor's, those of Jan Goldstein, Ian Hacking, Jerrold Seigel, and Dror Wahrman—is paradoxically that it is uniquely faithful to one of Foucault's founding assumptions.Footnote ¹ A number of those Anglo-American authors have worked creatively but faithfully in Foucault's tracks. By contrast, those who have striven to provide some fundamental alternative to Foucault's approach in Anglo-American scholarship have avoided the terrain that he did most, beginning with his earliest studies, to foreground: the history of the human sciences and auxiliary “helping” professions and, special among them for its fusion of theory and therapy, psychiatry. That the history of self is in some sense the history of the psyche has, however, been a core assumption of Gauchet's writings from the first. The task of explaining the invention of psychiatry and the nineteenth-century psychiatric and eventually psychoanalytic “discovery of the unconscious,” even after the mighty labors of several post-Foucaultian authors, retains much of its mystery and remains the heart of Gauchet's enterprise.

A reconstruction of the itinerary that led Gauchet (1946–) to his history of the self may also illuminate the history of recent and contemporary French thought. What little prior scholarship there is about Gauchet (including my own) entirely omits the writings on the self that make up at least half of his prolific output. Though usually—and by no means mistakenly—understood as a theorist of politics, Gauchet is, like Foucault, one who has always assumed that political theory must take up not simply the macroscopic study of constitutions or institutions but also the microscopic examination of personal identity and agency. In the politically heady and intellectually transformative years just after May 1968, Gauchet dedicated one of his first published essays to Sigmund Freud; and when he finally secured his current position as a professor at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, in 1989, he took as the title of his position “the constitution of the subject in contemporary societies” (a phrase he took to cover both individual and collective identity). Gauchet's original importation as a leading French thinker onto the Anglo-American scene identified him as a new liberal who fought free (as Mark Lilla recommended everyone should) of the thickets of postmodernism.Footnote ² Gauchet's account is indeed one of the creation of a liberal democratic subject. But put back in its formative time after 1968, Gauchet's story is centrally, if perhaps surprisingly, inspired by that most canonical postmodernist, Jacques Lacan. Indeed, it may have been Lacan who best summarized, when he evocatively called for “the assumption by man of his original fracturing,” the master theme Gauchet would find in the history of the modern self.Footnote ³

It should be noted right away, however, that this topic in Gauchet's corpus is inseparable from the contributions of someone else: his late partner, Gladys Swain (1945–93). There is good reason to insist on her contribution: it is thanks to her prior interest in and writings on the subject that Gauchet's own work came to incorporate the history of psychiatry to the extent that it did, and the two came to collaborate as authors and teachers. Indeed, it is likely that if Gauchet remains in the future a figure to be studied in intellectual history, his relationship with Swain will become one of those marriages of true minds deservedly now central to the existing canon. Their partnership began in the same geographical, intellectual, and experiential milieux, where it is useful to start.

ORIGINS OF A PROJECT

There were three fundamental contexts for the origins of Gauchet's project of historicizing the self. First, the antipsychiatry movement; next, Michel Foucault's complex inspirational anticipation of and then fellow-traveling with that movement, which took the form of narrating the history of madness as a way of indicting contemporary practices; and finally, Jacques Lacan's new version of psychoanalysis, which had mixed relations in France with the antipsychiatric enterprise but also provided Gauchet with the view of the human being for which he would interpret modernity as the forum of discovery.

Gauchet and Swain were both from Norman backgrounds. They both attended the University of Caen (a backwater provincial institution) in the late 1960s, where, at age twenty, he had encountered Claude Lefort, the philosopher who determined so much of the bearing of his work, then commuting from Paris to lecture there. Gauchet and Swain, for their parts, met in May 1968. He reported many years later that clashes over politics led to the initiation of a partnership.Footnote ⁴ Swain was a Trotskyist at the time—a member of a small band called the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire—while Gauchet, having been formed politically by the radical high-school teachers of the Ecole émancipée, was a kind of anarcho-libertarian who welcomed May 1968 as an “intoxicating shock” that sounded the death-knell of archaic and bureaucratic visions of the left.Footnote ⁵ Swain, too, convinced by the May events of the insufficiency of Trotskyism, joined Lefort's courses, which shaped (as their close friend put it) “an entire nebula of students at Caen who were discovering political philosophy—or even philosophy as such—in what was officially a sociology course.” Liberatory politics converged with a specific tradition of Continental theory to form a whole network of young people who happened to be at Caen at the time (often, like Gauchet and Swain, from modest backgrounds).Footnote ⁶

Swain, unlike the others, was a medical student training in psychiatry, and in fact soon would enter service in Caen as a practitioner, while also writing a medical thesis. And while it is true that psychoanalytic theory was of major importance not simply to French thought generally, but also to Lefort's theorizing specifically (following the train of his teacher's thought, Gauchet devoted the equivalent of a master's essay to Sigmund Freud, partially published in the Lefortian journal of the era), it was only through his relationship with Swain that the historical background to psychiatry came to figure at all in Gauchet's work—and it came to occupy a central place.Footnote ⁷ As Swain entered her career, first at an old Caen psychiatric hospital called Le Bon Sauveur run privately by a Catholic order, then elsewhere in Normandy before moving to the Paris area (she eventually worked with the Association de santé médicale of the city's thirteenth arrondissement that had founded the localist “sectorization” movement that came to dominate mental health policy), she found herself on the front lines of a struggle over slowly reforming institutions faced with radical new critiques.

With Swain, Gauchet turned to his topic in the age of the intellectual popularity and moral exigency of the antipsychiatry movement. Coined as a slogan by David Cooper in 1967 and made famous by such incendiary authors as R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz on the Anglo-American scene, antipsychiatry sounded the theses around the world that inherited mental health practices were repressive and often violent, and too frequently hurt more than they healed. Worse, for countercultural radicals of the time, asylum-based psychiatry fit with—indeed it epitomized—a culture of normalcy that stigmatized aberrant behavior as pathological. A project of social control lurked beneath superficially beneficent aims. Yet the French front of the movement, while certainly sharing these themes, had a number of special characteristics, not the least important of which was that it made psychoanalysis an ally where elsewhere it was the enemy. Having conformed to a medical model of healing in America, psychoanalysis won dominance over mid-century psychiatry there; in the France of the same era, by contrast, a biological approach so thoroughly prevailed that psychiatry was not a separate specialty from neurology until the 1968 explosion allowed reform proposals that had circulated before to be implemented, with psychoanalysis—especially Lacanian psychoanalysis—wholly on the outside throughout. This disciplinary situation would prove to be crucial, for it briefly allowed antipsychiatric commitments to be a bridge towards rather than away from psychoanalysis.Footnote ⁸

A few retrospective comments make clear that Gauchet and Swain were perfectly convinced, at least at the outset, by the antipsychiatric critique of existing theories of deviancy and institutions of control, and that Swain was horrified by her initial workplace settings. But Gauchet and Swain were also repelled in the years around 1968 by the uncompromising antipsychiatric critique of institutions, as if the project of healing were entirely misplaced and the answer were simply to unleash the forces of madness that had been suppressed. (The most imposing monument of this moment when insanity became a kind of privileged totem of countercultural striving was surely Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oepidus of 1972).Footnote ⁹ As Gauchet put it in reflecting on the cultural significance of the romance of madness of that era, “the poetic and transgressive flamboyance of insanity, though stimulating to the mind, is a poor preparation for the shock of an intractable psychosis.”Footnote ¹⁰

Here again, it seems to have been Swain's experiences that led the couple early to such conclusions and the search for a middle way between the conservative defense of hidebound institutions and the anarchic celebration of illness. Swain, Gauchet reported in a touching retrospective overview of her life and career, had “more than her share of squabbles—half-dramatic and half-comedic—with vindictive nuns and a few other adepts of ‘treatment’ through lock and key.”Footnote ¹¹ On the one hand, then, there was the necessary campaign against prevalent care. But on the other, a practitioner face to face with the indigence of the disturbed—Swain courageously chose to work with institutionalized patients rather than in office-based therapy—had to search for a genuine alternative to the inhumanity of the prior regime.Footnote ¹² Gauchet could therefore present Swain's trajectory as emblematic of the best choices of his generation, in a fascinating historiographical directive. “It will belong to future historians,” he wrote,

For present purposes what is essential to understanding this writing team is not the therapeutic sequel to antipsychiatry but the historiographical one, even if Swain's professional imperative of saving what Gauchet called the “rational kernel” of the critique of prevalent care undoubtedly informed their authorial endeavors. Gauchet and Swain turned to the history of psychiatry, Gauchet eventually for the light it cast on the overall history of subjectivity, and in this regard it was Foucault's influence that proved indispensable. With his attempt to recover the unreason confined to demented or criminal geniuses like Antonin Artaud, Foucault's normative commitments, at least in the main line of his argument, fit so perfectly with antipsychiatry when it emerged that The History of Madness could retroactively become one of the movement's canonical texts.Footnote ¹⁴ Gauchet's first essay on Freud was not historical in the least. But the influence of Foucault's scintillating studies in the history of psychiatry—projects to which Foucault was himself returning in the era—encouraged Gauchet to see Freudianism as a historical product of some kind, and the history of psychology leading up to it as opening a window onto the making of the healthy self.Footnote ¹⁵ Foucault's incandescent interpretation of the origins of psychiatry, everyone will recall, argued that it was no liberating humanitarianism breaking the chains of an earlier and inhumane “great enclosure,” but a kind of diabolical perfection of that earlier enclosure through a move towards controlling expertise and classificatory subjugation in the guise of enlightened help (though the disastrous triumph of rationality allows for a countertradition of mad artists). But Swain's decision to work within the institutions she inherited and her encounter with the realities of mental illness led her to wonder, for all her skepticism towards medical expertise, whether the history of psychiatry as Foucault had narrated it could stand. The theoretical and practical excesses of antipsychiatry suggested the likely historiographical limits of Foucault's account that was doing so much to provide intellectual authority for antipsychiatry. And so Swain embarked on a project to revisit the sources. As Gauchet suggested later, Foucault's model exercised so irresistible an attraction over their generation that they were almost saddened to find its empirical basis faulty and its theoretical outlook misguided. In spite of their strong criticism, however, the couple was always forthright that Foucault's History of Madness had in some sense made their own work possible. “Without the incitement of this masterwork, nothing would have been possible,” Gauchet stated recently. “If we reasoned against him, we always knew it was thanks to him. There is a before Foucault and an after Foucault.”Footnote ¹⁶ Still, as Swain prepared her thesis and plunged with Gauchet into the primary source material, what they found could not but lead them to serious reservations.

It would be an error, however, to present their work as if it simply provided an empirical corrective to Foucault's politically and theoretically driven account. For the source of their account of the history of psychological self depended fundamentally on a selective reading and creative application of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory. It is historically decisive that, at a crucial moment, Lacanian psychoanalysis was thought to fit neatly with antipsychiatry. The publication of Lacan's Ecrits at the end of 1966 had been a major intellectual event, and it is clear that the twenty-year-old Gauchet steeped himself in them. But not only did Lacan's psychoanalysis (as he later put it) appear to vindicate “the promise of a wholly pure psychoanalysis, delivered from any medicalizing and Americanizing compromises, and returned to its subversive vocation,” it also presented a vision of psychoanalysis whose stress on talking and listening made it appear to escape the antipsychiatric critique of harsh confinement behind bars and imperious classification in silence. Thus “Freud and Foucault could make common cause.”Footnote ¹⁷ It is highly significant that both in his memorial essay for Swain and in his own autobiography Gauchet has suggested that no account of what 1968 meant can leave out informal circles that sprang up dedicated to the intensive reading of Freudian and especially Lacanian texts.Footnote ¹⁸ Very quickly as the 1970s passed, however, the joint venture between antipsychiatry and Lacanian psychoanalysis broke down. After all, the critique of professional knowledge in Foucault's History of Madness, as well as his lecture courses of the era, were explicitly and evidently indictments of psychoanalysis as a normalizing discourse and practice too, whatever its official rhetoric of talking and listening and even if Foucault himself vacillated on Freud's significance.Footnote ¹⁹ But in the event it was above all Deleuze and Guattari, taking psychoanalysis as their primary target in propounding their philosophy of desire, who forced a choice.

The choice Gauchet made is clear. From the welter of obscure pronouncements to be found in Lacan's writings, it is worth retaining three points that causally influenced Gauchet's narrative of the evolution of the self. In the first place there was Lacan's position that psychoanalysis had to be transplanted from the strictly medical framework in which Freud had invented and understood it so that its innovations could be seen as touching on—and sometimes correcting—the most profound or at least most abstract traditions of thinking about the nature of human subjectivity that Westerners possess. Briefly, Lacan brought psychoanalysis into its “proper” conversation with Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and others.Footnote ²⁰ Second, Lacan claimed that even comparatively healthy subjects were to be understood by recapturing their constitutive and necessary alienation, in their stadial emergence as selves, first through the self-dividing incorporation of a mirrored imaginary, and then through their entry into society through internalized symbols and rules. In other words, identity is possible only at the high but necessary price of alterity. Third and finally, there was Lacan's argument that the psychoanalysis he inherited had failed to make sense of psychosis and his related claim that what psychotic disturbance (as opposed to neurotic illness) meant was the inability of subjectivity itself to take hold. Briefly, those without reason were those without selves. These three points—which Gauchet adopted in some form for his own uses, insisting that they were separable from the specific development that Lacan gave them—will enter in different moments as the historical account he and Swain developed is laid out.Footnote ²¹

THE FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHIATRY

It is impossible to understand how Gauchet made the history of psychiatry so central to a story of the modern self without concentrating on what he saw as their common beginnings. Foucault's narrative famously started with a depiction of the easy interaction of the Renaissance world with the insane, a society of harmonious exchange and even happy integration ruined by the “great enclosure” of the classical age and epitomized by René Descartes's dichotomy of reason and madness. This was the story, occupying the bulk of Foucault's attention, that drew the ire of a generation of Anglo-American historians.Footnote ²² But Swain (with whose earliest efforts Gauchet has plausibly claimed consortium rights) dedicated her thesis to taking a closer look at the moment, in Foucault's penultimate chapter, in which the advent of psychiatry liberated the mad into the grips of a consolation and classification perhaps worse than the naked oppression that came before. A remarkable but neglected work, Swain's thesis, Le sujet de la folie (defended in 1975 and published with additions in 1977), introduced the core of the couple's interpretation of the origins of psychiatry and is ground zero for Gauchet's emergent reading of the history of modern subjectivity.Footnote ²³

The thesis is essentially a detailed reading of Pinel's theory of madness as laid out in his Traité médico-philosophique sur l'aliénation mentale (1800). Swain's empirical contributions alone were such as to seriously imperil Foucault's account. She emphasized that Foucault, while citing the first edition of this founding book, actually used the very different revised version of a decade later. (Gauchet reported that their accidental discovery of this fact first led them to suspect deeper problems with Foucault's analysis.) Swain also documented—first in a long footnote to her thesis, then in a complementary appendix she wrote to round it out as a book—that the showpiece episode of disciplinary mythology and of Foucault's chapter, Pinel's liberation of the mad at the asylum of Bicêtre from the chains that bound them, had actually been invented as a powerful myth by his son a generation later. (Essentially all historians of Pinel's career have followed Swain on this latter point.) But these rectifications, cited somewhat repetitively by Gauchet later in his career, are of interest only insofar as they were offered in the course of a novel interpretation of Pinel's significance intended to supplant and in part reverse the one Foucault had offered.Footnote ²⁴

The original version of Pinel's treatise, Swain argued, betrayed the path of thought that animated his whole scheme of conceiving of and classifying mental illness. It also revealed him, therefore, to be first and foremost a theorist of insanity, rather than simply a humanitarian practitioner. Pinel, Swain contended, had begun his theorizing through a confrontation with what he called “intermittent delirium,” a malady in which normal routines were ousted by temporary illness. Certainly in these cases, Pinel contended, the madness of the sick had to be in some sense “superficial,” so that even in the patient's worst periods of disturbance the earlier and later conditions of his normal functioning persisted—otherwise how could it return? For Swain, Pinel's radical démarche was to infer from this case the premise that no madness is ever complete. Pinel's book was epoch-making because it involved “the critique of the idea of a thoroughgoing insanity. Mental alienation is never total: the alienated always preserves distance from his alienation,” she wrote.Footnote ²⁵ In spite of Pinel's own apparent organicism, madness was never just a bodily affliction, as medicine earlier had concluded (and would often later conclude). It was a malady of split personal identity; if someone was “alienated,” in the parlance of the time, it was from himself. To infer from the case of intermittent delirium, mental affliction never fully destroys its host; the insane always remains the subject of his insanity (hence the title of her book), deployed against himself in ways that made him suffer.

This imputed breakthrough, of course, was only the beginning of a theory of madness, because it did not tell where it came from or why it happened; it only hypothesized that it was an affliction in which the subject turned for some reason against itself (albeit never to the point of extinction). Swain went on to contend that the example of intermittent delirium structured Pinel's whole nosology. The criterion of distinction amongst diseases, she claimed, was how badly unseated the subject is, how powerless to master his madness. But even at the furthest pole—that of idiotism, which had been healed—the lesson was that “the limit at which alienation might touch on accomplished subjective elimination is brushed up upon, but without actually being completely reached.”Footnote ²⁶ If Pinel's entire classification of ailments showed that he thought subjective destitution was involved, it also documented his conclusion that they were “partial,” if only in the specific sense that they never extinguished the subject as such. Of course, this did not mean that different diseases attacked different abilities of the subject conceived as an aggregate or ensemble of separable functions; instead, it was the self as such that all diseases attacked, and it was the extent to which the self retained its autonomy against this assault that distinguished the various diseases from one another. “Alienation, put differently, is never either only partial nor ever really total,” Swain summarized her reading. “It is at once always partial and always total. It is always total to the extent that it affects the subject in its being as a subject while it is always partial insofar as there is never a pure and simple abolition of the subjective character in madness.”Footnote ²⁷

As authority for her overall argument, Swain could call on none other than Hegel, who in fact mentions Pinel in a note in his Encyclopedia. According to Hegel, madness is precisely not an absence of reason but a “contradiction within it,” as Pinel had first seen: Pinel, Hegel noted, had “discovered this remnant of reason in the alienated and maniacal.”Footnote ²⁸ An initial reason to suspect the influence of Lacan here is that, of course, he so vividly argued for the interpretive entwinement of psychology and philosophy, in ways that allowed Hegel's passing comment on Pinel to be seen as the key to the latter's interpretation (though Foucault had cited part of this passage himself without making much of it). But already in Swain's inaugural work there is something deeper afoot in the definition of insanity as subjective division, which shows the Lacanian origins of her cause. According to Swain, the most profound significance of Pinel's “discovery” was to register a shift in the history of society; it was not so much Pinel's genius as the shift itself that made the discovery possible, and it is her interpretation of the revolution permitting new insight into psychic malady that betrays the Lacanian framing of this story.

The era of the Enlightenment and revolution, she wrote, had “as its primordial characteristic to bring about a society that broke with any explanation of itself that was based on an Other than itself—and especially on God as creator and supreme legislator.” This was

This passage requires a great deal of commentary, beginning with the reference it makes to Gauchet's larger and contemporaneously developed theory of the history of society, and then turning to the basis of both in Lacanian inspiration.

With his teacher Lefort, Gauchet had during the 1970s been working on a theory of the history of society in which the successive regimes were always defined by how they managed the representations that integrated them. In what amounted to a socialized version of Lacan's theory of specular integration of the subject, in which children cannot gain selves without the mirror that provides an “imaginary” vision that affords them identity (though at the price of alienation), so societies also rely on representations to gain their coherent integration. Most of human history, Gauchet concluded in reflecting on his friend the anthropologist Pierre Clastres's studies, had chosen a particularly acute form of this necessary “division” (as they called it). In all the various historical societies, beginning in primitive times, thought by their members to be ruled by exterior gods or past ancestors, Gauchet wrote, “the place of social practice and the place from which it is believed to proceed and draw its legitimacy” are different. “Modes of organization, customs, rites, usages, and techniques: the totality of traits that amount to social life is conceived only in reference to an origin situated in a radical elsewhere and is thought to make sense only in reference to an absolutely other place.”Footnote ³⁰ Democracy changes all this: society rules itself from the inside. In the cited passage of her book, Swain was saying along Gauchet's lines that Pinel's achievement had to be situated in the larger transition of society away from the primitive model that depended on the “hallucinatory” reference to gods.

But what happened to division in this transition? Did “the Other” go away altogether in this shift toward the immanent or internal? Working at the level of the individual or personal rather than the social or collective subject, Pinel's achievement suggested not. Swain—in a formulation whose allusion to mirroring is graphic evidence of the Lacanian model for the entire argument—had written that in a modern society “that has ceased to mirror itself [se mirer] in its Other in order to see itself, this limit experience of the Other in the self that madness is appears in a strongly different light.” What Pinel had done, in his discovery of the basis of madness in self-destitution that never led to self-destruction, was to draw the inference that the previous externalization of alterity had not allowed before: madness is a form of self-division. Further, the Pinelian recognition of the persisting normalcy (at some level) of even the most disturbed patient meant that there was no absolute barrier within humanity between health and pathology. The newly perceived roots of abnormality in self-division anticipated Freud's later discovery of the unconscious, his name for the ordinary self-division that could also be the source of pathological neurosis and psychosis. Beyond Freud, there lay Lacan, for whom, in a deeper sense than even for Freud, identity depended on internal alterity and treatment involved coming to terms with it. Pinel's move, Swain concluded,

In plainer terms, Pinel's discovery opened the way for an era in which healthy selfhood, and not just deranged alienation, is understood as self-divided conflict.

The pivot of the history of the modern self—which Pinel occupied—is thus the implicit recognition that what is other to humanity is not in a “hallucinatory” outside but in constitutive internal self-division. The anthropology that grounds this history, as well as the endpoint towards which it unfolds, is Lacanian to the core. It should be noted that (as in Hegel) the anthropology is inseparable from its historical “realization.” In one sense, division is constitutive from the outset: there is original fracturing. If society begins by externalizing this division both for the collective and for the individual, it is only because inner discord is anthropologically unavoidable, with religion warding it off to the extent possible.Footnote ³² For this reason, historical developments and social changes are required for inner discord to be “assumed,” in the dual sense of activated and acknowledged. It is also worth emphasis that the history of the modern self as Gauchet interprets it is as much an experiential or lived development, changing in tandem with social organization, as it is a theoretical shift, in which self-understanding moves away from hallucinatory projection to lucid acceptance. Both as lived and interpreted, alterity remains active across the modern divide: it would be an error to see the Lacanian template governing only Gauchet's presentation of premoderns in thrall to imaginary unity, for what is accepted by more lucid moderns is the persisting self-division, initiated by the mirror stage and confirmed by symbolic entry, that allowed for premodern hallucination in the first place.Footnote ³³

Of course, even read generously, Pinel's insight into the nature of madness only anticipated later developments in which the self-division perceived in madness occurred in other forms in selfhood as such. In a longer treatment of Hegel, and the similar break in understanding of madness that he registered within the tradition of German idealism, Swain argued this point explicitly: “If Hegel understands madness as conflict, he does not see in this conflict the manifestation or prolongation of an underlying conflictual organization of the psyche. . . [There is] no inscription of madness in a subjective economy centered on conflict.”Footnote ³⁴ Nevertheless, for Swain the foundational history of psychiatry reflected the truly profound mutation in human self-understanding, the move from a society in which alterity is seen as external to subjectivity (individual and social) to one in which the two are acknowledged to be bound up. For this reason, Swain could say her book studied “the discovery of the distant foundations of our current conception of the psyche.”Footnote ³⁵ In this way, Pinel registered an epochal shift in which alterity has literally gone inside. The full recognition of this development, at best implicit early on, would still have to come about, as both psychiatry and philosophy followed the trajectory “from man in conflict in madness to man as a being of conflict.”Footnote ³⁶ The owl of this wisdom—one of non-reconciliation—would really fly only later.

THE ASYLUM, THE UNCONSCIOUS, AND THE FUTURE

Instead of completing this narrative fully, Gauchet and Swain made the dubious choice of girding for battle with Foucault on the significance of the asylum. As they turned chronologically to Pinel's handpicked successor, Jean-Etienne Esquirol, they began to draft a preface to a reprint of his major theoretical intervention in what exploded logorrheically into their massive tome on the origins of institutional care, La pratique de l'esprit humain (partly translated into English as Madness and Democracy).Footnote ³⁷ But in taking up so polemically and at such length what had been Foucault's problem of the professional–institutional treatment of madness, Gauchet, with Swain, perforce took a detour from the story of the trajectory of the modern self, and the evolution of how it has been theorized, that they had begun to study.

There were a number of likely causes. Foucault himself, after a period of structuralist intellectual history, had returned not long before with Discipline and Punish to the history of “subjectivating” institutions. More generally, as Foucault had opened the field of the history of the subject, it could easily have seemed necessary not simply to occupy the domain he had cleared but to attempt a spectacular assassination of the king. On a practical level, the canonical status and cultural authority of Foucault's history of madness, confirmed by his updated vision of totalizing control, might have made it seem worth trying to redirect antipsychiatry with a different gospel, especially given Swain's continuing therapeutic pursuits. As for Gauchet, since Madness and Democracy appeared in 1980, his annus mirabilis in which he helped found Le Débat and completed his self-transformation into liberal political philosopher, the logic of intellectual self-creation in France probably beckoned him to the model of the frontal contest—especially on a topic, for the new disciple of François Furet that he was, in which the French Revolution could take center stage. (Through the time of the development of their ideas about Pinel, Gauchet and Swain had remained on the far left, and the French Revolution barely figures in Swain's single-authored book.) It may have all been a waste. Foucault—though assigned the book by Le Monde for review—opted to ignore their work, out of unclear motives.Footnote ³⁸ And though it may be excessive to say the overloaded missile was a dud, nevertheless, as Gauchet has recently acknowledged, no one noticed its drop.Footnote ³⁹

To be sure, Madness and Democracy is more than a vast distraction. The entire point of Foucault's project in several of its iterations, and quite clearly of his treatment of the origins of psychiatry, is that the history of the self and the history of professions and institutions for theorizing it and caring for it are not separate problems. And even in her description of Pinel's theoretical breakthrough, Swain planted the seed of a serious critique of Foucault's whole manner of envisaging the history of the self in its relation to the helping professions. If Pinel had moved from a theoretical model in which the mad were possessed by gods or reduced to animals to one in which their disturbances were superimposed on human normalcy, then the core equation in Foucault's Madness and Civilization and beyond of modernity with exclusion could not be sustained. As a theoretical matter, Pinel's insight was an inclusionary act, since the alienated were not fundamentally different beings from ordinary people. More important, while both the celebratory humanitarian and Foucaultian cynic concurred that therapy came from the outside (as philanthropic help or covert imperialism), Pinel's newly retrieved insight implied that healing need and could not originate as a norm imposed from without; instead, it might answer an originally interior imperative. In Swain's earliest formulation, “The exit of the madman from his madness is in process in himself first of all and it is to the mobilization of his internal resources that any relationship that he establishes with the therapist must contribute.”Footnote ⁴⁰ (Once again, she could claim the authority of Hegel, for whom the remnant of reason in the insane that had been Pinel's true discovery also “contained the principle of their healing, and [he] directed their treatment according to this principle.”Footnote ⁴¹) At great length, but without the stylistic charm of Foucault's comparably massive prose poem, Madness and Democracy mounted the case implicit in these suggestions.

Gauchet and Swain argued that after the initial failure of early hopes—founded on Pinel's theoretical insight—for communication with the mad, the institutional grandiosity of the French Revolution promoted the “totalitarian” dream of an institution that could cure the ill through socialization.Footnote ⁴² To the extent that its reformist utopianism extinguished the chances for assisting the subject of madness, the asylum had failed, and Gauchet and Swain were wholly willing to concur with criticism of institutionalization down to their own times. In their zeal to connect the birth of the asylum and the era of the French Revolution, the theorist they invoked most often—with Gauchet having become one of the principal partisans of his revival—was Alexis de Tocqueville.Footnote ⁴³ Now an extrapolated version of Tocqueville's story of the breakdown of hierarchy into equality seemed to Gauchet and Swain to cover the inclusion of the insane within the anthropological sphere of all other human subjects. If Foucault had been correct that in the pre-classical age the mad lived in happy proximity to everyone else, it was not because they were included in a happy contiguity about to be destroyed. Rather, as Tocqueville had seen, premodern society allowed massive differences to be interpreted as part of the nature of things, so that the normal and the mad coexisted not in spite of their radical distinction from each other but because of it, just as aristocrats and commoners and masters and servants lived cheek by jowl according to the principle of interlocking difference rather than inclusive equality. The great enclosure happened because this hierarchical society was breaking down, not because it was deepening, and in the long view the rise of the asylum occurred when Pinel and others criticized the initial phobic response to the mad in the name of the growing similarity of normal and pathological that had provoked it. Indeed, the hatred of exclusion that Foucault and antipsychiatry voiced simply extended this Tocquevillian drift to the point where its origins in the early stages of inclusion that it now stigmatized were very difficult to perceive as such. Nevertheless, both in the genesis of their book and in its conceptual foundations, Gauchet and Swain remained far more profoundly indebted to Lacan than to Tocqueville. The choice their generation had come to face between antipsychiatry and psychoanalysis could not but lead away from Foucault's totalized critique of care. More deeply, it was a Lacanian anthropology, in which constitutive alterity shifted from outside to inside, that allowed the mutation that Gauchet now saw in terms of Tocquevillian equalization. Lacan loomed over their deepest conclusion that the progress of “inclusion” was not just a history of leveling individualization but “also, and necessarily, a history of personal dispossession or subjective destitution. . . The realized incorporation of personal alterity provides the key to the progressive inclusion of madness.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In emphasizing the comparative autonomy and lucidity of modern individuals, and the democratic order they created, Gauchet found a Furetian and liberalizing alternative to Foucault that nevertheless reposed on a Lacanian foundation. In other words, he embedded a normative defense of modernity in his depiction of reappropriated alterity—with history being the story of augmented personal and collective liberty. Yet it came at the price of the experience and recognition of internal alienation: though he repudiated the emphasis on the exclusions of reason in history, Gauchet's view of modernity is neither triumphant nor reconciliationist, since its hallmark is the slow recognition of primordial and unsublatable diremption.Footnote ⁴⁵ At the end of the book, however, the question remained: how to get to the unconscious, the main landmark in this “realized incorporation”? Due to Swain's death, and Gauchet's manifold other pursuits, the answer to this question (so far) remains fragmentary. And while one might be forgiven for expecting a highly speculative dialectical story of what one might call “the cunning of unreason” (an expectation, I will show, that is not disappointed), it is only fair to mention that the various pieces of an answer that Gauchet and Swain provided committed them to a surprisingly large amount of empirical research. In fact, from 1980 to 1985, Gauchet and Swain taught a seminar together that provided a forum for their own findings on the history of psychiatry, and allowed for others to contribute to their venture. It was their position from the beginning that, beyond Pinel, a whole long evolution of psychiatric theory had to be reconstructed so as to avoid the impression that Freud cultivated of creator ex nihilo.Footnote ⁴⁶ There is not sufficient space here to review their disparate arguments, and in any case the few building blocks that have been published do not yet amount to a fully fledged historical construction. In her thesis, Swain had shown her awareness that a long physicalistic interregnum separated the Pinelian and psychoanalytic investigations of subjectivity; and in his most uncharacteristic book, L'inconscient cérébral, Gauchet made a detailed case for the importance of nineteenth-century reflex theory in creating the conditions for the possibility of the unconscious.Footnote ⁴⁷ As for the seminar, it gave rise to the collective work Le vrai Charcot, in which Gauchet, Swain, and their collaborators attempted to historicize the theory and cure of hysteria that provided the immediate backdrop to Freud's innovations. What is stressed, again, is what Gauchet has called Freud's “latent model of the irreducible character of psychic division, strongly accentuated by Lacan later.”Footnote ⁴⁸

In the most continuous narrative Gauchet has told—a text entitled “From Pinel to Freud” written as the introduction for the posthumous reprinting of Swain's book—the main theme of the history of psychiatric theory is the constant purification of the basic Pinelian thesis that the madman is the subject of his madness in the face of the dogged threat of regression to the belief in the complete abolition of subjectivity. With each figure—from Pinel to Esquirol and beyond—the basic thesis is announced but compromised by some persistence of the older model it overthrew, a blockage it then becomes the new task for successors to remove before they frustratingly reinstate it in new form.Footnote ⁴⁹ Having been posited by Pinel in primitive and adulterated fashion as the definition of madness, the idea of self-division can finally emerge fully fledged thanks to the nosological distinction of the neuroses; their differentiation allowed Freud to impute the division of the psyche of all humans into conscious and unconscious parts in order to make sense of the neurotic malady of a few. Almost immediately, however, the theoretical uses of self-division spilled over into theoretical inquiry into psychosis—as in the disengagement of schizophrenia in the early twentieth century.

It is in the study of the theoretical problem of psychosis in the twentieth century that Gauchet provides some final evidence that he set himself the problem of rewriting the history of psychiatry in light not just of the Freudian but also of the Lacanian démarche—and later hypothesized what his narrative might say about the post-Lacanian future of the history of the self and of its theoretical interpretation. This problem, though it requires more allusion to doctrinal specifics of psychoanalysis than can be adequately covered here, is worth mentioning as the source of what one might call the “dialectic” of Gauchet's narrative of the history of psychological theory.

Among Lacan's most famous arguments in his time was that psychoanalysis so far possessed no coherent account for what differentiated neurosis from psychosis, and therefore of how to treat the latter. He forcefully claimed that the theoretical problem of psychosis could be solved only when understood as a failure to become a subject, due to failure to progress through the mandatory “access to the symbolic” that his scheme of normative development involved. Swain had already written in her first book that Pinel's discovery also had created the conditions for the possibility of this Lacanian discovery.Footnote ⁵⁰ For his part, Gauchet has returned so repeatedly to the significance of this argument as to make clear that it was formative for him as the more specific thesis that licensed the reconstruction of the history of psychiatry as the recognition that madness puts the subject in question.Footnote ⁵¹ Gauchet writes, for example, that with Lacan “comes about a new scene of the question of the subject, slated to remain for a long time ignored as such.” For

Quite clearly, then, a theoretical event to which the youthful Gauchet was witness explained what he came to think the history of psychiatry had always been about.

But if Lacan's more specific theory of psychosis retroactively provided the topic and stakes of Gauchet's history of the self, its example also may have provided the implicit dynamic driving it sketched above. For very early on, Gauchet and Swain concluded that, having posed a challenge to the psychoanalytic tradition by decrying its lack of any adequate theory of psychosis, Lacan then went on to provide a wholly implausible one of his own. In particular, the Lacanian theory of early childhood damage did not explain what observation by Pinel and since suggested, that even some of the most disturbed psychotics had been lucid before the onset of their maladies, or even returned to normalcy intermittently after, and—at least it was hoped—might do so permanently. “What Pinel encountered in intermittent mania continues to concentrate in itself the enigma that psychosis remains,” Swain maintained:

Gauchet was more lapidary, twenty years on: “In his effort to grasp the specificity of madness as madness of the subject, [Lacan] nevertheless ended up forgetting the subject of madness [le sujet de la folie].”Footnote ⁵⁴ Just as he was on the brink of a theory that might explain psychosis, having finally at least posed the problem in its proper terms, Lacan “resuscitated, in his own fashion, the antique phantom of an irremediable and complete madness.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Whether or not it was correct, the historical narrative Gauchet crafted of the perpetual rediscovery of the true nature of madness, spoiled by a fall backward into the old regime that the breakthrough was supposed to finally overcome, evidently derived from his earliest conclusions about Lacan's combination of insight and error.

Of course, Lacan's very failure suggested that no history of the self could simply lead teleologically to him, as if the assumption by man of his original fracturing ended there. And in a wide-ranging recent pair of essays on the contemporary psyche and its current conceptualization, Gauchet has attempted to foresee what the next decisive step might bring about.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even so, it is as if, having used the relative Lacanian endpoint to detect the deepest meaning of the breakthroughs of 1800 (Pinel) and 1900 (Freud), Gauchet continued to extrapolate, with the Lacanian waystation pointing with relative assurance into a present presumably ready for another great leap forward. Where the later Foucault famously focused on the care of the self in a presubjective Greek past, Gauchet wanted to find progress—at least in self-knowledge—in the immanent development of modern theory.

In his later work, Gauchet has endeavored in a far more pronounced way than before to correlate the modern trajectories of the individual and collective subject, rather than studying psychological theory in relative isolation.Footnote ⁵⁷ At the level of the experience of selfhood, Gauchet claims that society has evolved in ways that partially left behind the conditions permitting the Freudian individual and the Freudian discovery. A general pacification of social and interior life has meant not just a thoroughgoing dedramatization of collective politics, but an extraordinary decline of the hysterical (and perhaps more generally neurotic) symptomatology that allowed for the last breakthrough. The “modern individual”—itself a radically new type insofar as it was the first to have the internal alterity of an unconscious—has given way to the “contemporary individual,” whose appearance

This mutation does not mean, however, that the constitutive division of the “contemporary” subject melts away or diminishes its essential conflictuality. But this hypothesis does, Gauchet says, account for why such internal division need not necessarily correlate with dramatic social expression. And it tries to explain the much-noted but still confusing development that hysteria and other classic neuroses have been replaced by other kinds of pathology, such as uncertainty about identity or pronounced failure to master relations with needed but feared others in social life.

The consequences of experiential change for the theory of the self are, Gauchet thinks, large. The problem of psychosis remains where Lacan left it—posed but unsolved.Footnote ⁵⁹ More generally, the Freudian paradigm has broken down because the synthesis it offers is no longer adequate in light of the current disarray in the classification of pathology. But most profoundly, Gauchet sees the shift from the modern to the contemporary individual as a theoretical opportunity to broaden the original discovery of the unconscious beyond its historical limits to allow a far more general insight about the nature of the relationship between selfhood and otherness. In Gauchet's view, psychoanalysis emerged at a time when the externalization that religion involved had not so much disappeared as taken on disguises—“secular religions” in politics, for example, or an aesthetic cult that made art a substitute for religion. With the collapse of those surrogates, it is becoming increasingly possible to focus on the internal sources of alterity that once gave rise to the externalization of meaning in both their overt and their holdover forms. Now that few people rely on politics or art to provide the search for transcendence that they had only supposedly given up, the investigation can shift to the divided subject all by itself. It is finally returned

Gauchet warns that “nothing would be more deceptive” than to consider the processes that once led to Freud's discovery of the unconscious as “terminal,” but it sounds very much like he thinks current processes are: approaching the definitive theoretical embrace and exploration of constitutive subjective division which, having once driven history and created external objects, is now being seen for the internal fissure that it is—that we are. In his own words, “The very process which culminates in the elimination of the invisible from objective reality thus leads us to discover the subjective roots of the belief in the invisible.”Footnote ⁶¹ Even so, the end of history in the recognition of alienation is only a prelude, Gauchet says, to deeper spadework on these finally discovered and avowed foundations of subjectivity. Further, the investigation of madness remains the “royal road” (as Freud once said of dreams) into the mystery of self-division. The assumption by man of his original fracturing has, for Gauchet, only just begun.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Gauchet's project will not appeal to those allergic to history so openly informed—some will say dictated—by large-scale speculative philosophy, in spite of whatever claims for the empirical validity of his findings one might try to make. Without attempting any fair evaluation of his relevance to the now apparently established Anglo-American field of the history of the self, there are nevertheless two more general provocations in Gauchet's arguments that are worth registering in conclusion. The threshhold value of his work, in common with that of Foucault before him, is that it opens basic questions about the parameters—here I will simply mention two—of the whole domain of inquiry.

If Gauchet's narrative could enter into dialogue with ongoing Anglo-American inquiry, it is because it begins with the same basic assumption that there is something like a distinctively modern experience and theory of individual existence that has to be described and explained. It is, however, a striking feature of the recent Anglo-American historiography that, in its generous inclusion of all discourses of the self in modern times, it risks occluding the specifically psychiatric lineage whose importance Foucault did so much to promote. Jan Goldstein's work provides an illuminating example of this drift. Her move to the topic of the “post-revolutionary self” led her away from the focus on psychiatry as a discipline.Footnote ⁶² Jerrold Seigel, who looks exclusively at the theory of the self in his monumental recent book, provides a study of the history of high philosophy rather than the history of the psychological or human sciences. Yet this quite marked recent displacement of the main trajectory from Pinel to Freud and the implicit commitment to read the history of selfhood in the light of madness—to which only Ian Hacking provides a counterexample, and his studies, for all their wealth, have by and large remained timebound—turns out to be partial in and at the end. After all, everyone continues to take Freud as the crucial end of the road of the history of the self. This is true in Goldstein's work, but the disconcerting resurgence of Freud at the end of Seigel's treatment is the most revealing proof.Footnote ⁶³ More faithful at least in this regard to one of Foucault's founding premises, Gauchet's attempted history therefore presses the question on the field of whether—contrary to recent developments—the history of psychopathology remains the lowly professional material in which the truth of the history of the self is to be sought.

And yet, as I have tried to show, Freud is, for Gauchet, only the towering landmark in the journey of the experience and theory of the modern self. He has never—not least when the main premises of Gauchet's account were forged—been its true destination. Even if one refuses to assign Lacan the largely but not always covert significance in the history of human self-understanding that Gauchet does, it would be easy to see another useful provocation in his commitment not to aim the history of the modern self at an event only halfway through the era, now over two centuries long, since Pinel's “breakthrough.” The story of Pinel to Freud in psychology, for all its undoubted importance, remains unintegrated in any major existing account into a larger depiction of the vicissitudes of the modern self into the twentieth century and beyond, whether with a focus on the psychiatry or not. Even if Lacan provided far from the only way of breaking with the residual positivism of Freudian metapsychology, his strenuous attempt to do so provides a reminder that the psychoanalytic breakthrough left many possible sequels.Footnote ⁶⁴ Her post-revolutionary self, as Goldstein would undoubtedly acknowledge, is not equivalent to the larger modern self, while Seigel's treatment, amazingly capacious, nonetheless intrudes in the century beyond Freud only to reveal where in his view the theory of the self went off the rails. By comparison, from the beginning Gauchet's history of the self has been a “history of the present” in a far more literal sense than Foucault assigned that phrase. Not everyone may share Marcel Gauchet's specifically Lacanian premise that “human experience is always an experience of alterity to self.”Footnote ⁶⁵ But the history he has spun out of that premise does challenge entrants into the field not to craft their tales toward an endpoint too long ago. The appearance of the unconscious and the invention of psychoanalysis may have been only the first steps, not the last stops, in an ongoing adventure.