Absolutely—let’s apply genealogical methodology to the history of psychoanalysis. The aim is not to trace a linear development from Freud to the present, but to de-naturalize psychoanalysis, to see it not as a timeless science of the soul, but as a historically contingent dispositif—a shifting configuration of discourses, institutions, practices, power relations, and subject-formations that emerged in response to specific historical problems.
I. Genealogical Question
Not: What is psychoanalysis, and how has it progressed?
But:
How did psychoanalysis emerge as a dispositif of truth about the self, sexuality, and the unconscious—and how has it mutated across time to serve different configurations of power, subjectivity, and therapeutic governance?
II. Step-by-Step Genealogical Analysis
1. De-naturalization: Psychoanalysis as a historical formation
Psychoanalysis is often presented as the heroic discovery of the unconscious by Freud—a universal science of human subjectivity.
Genealogical move:
What historical problems and social conditions allowed for the emergence of psychoanalytic discourse in late 19th-century Europe?
2. Problematizations: Historical Conditions That Gave Rise to Psychoanalysis
A. Late 19th Century Vienna: Hysteria and the Bourgeois Family
Historical problem: How to understand and control non-rational behaviors (especially among bourgeois women) that resisted medical explanation?
Strategic emergence:
• Freud positions himself between neurology and psychology.
• Transforms “hysteria” from somatic dysfunction to psychic conflict.
• Rewrites sexuality as developmental, repressed, and dangerous.
Dispositif:
• Discourse: Repression, unconscious, Oedipus complex, transference
• Institution: The psychoanalytic clinic, case histories, training analysis
• Subjectivity: The split subject of repression; the neurotic self who must speak their truth
• Power: The analyst as interpreter of hidden truth; knowledge legitimized through confession and interpretation
B. Interwar and Postwar Eras: Expansion and Normalization
Historical problem: How to stabilize the psyche in the wake of war, mass trauma, urban alienation, and family restructuring?
Strategic mutation:
• Psychoanalysis travels: from Vienna to London, New York, Buenos Aires
• Becomes part of child development, education, military psychiatry, cultural critique
• Shift from drive-based theories to ego psychology in the U.S.
Dispositif:
• Discourse: Ego strength, adaptation, object relations
• Institution: Training institutes, APA certification, “psy” professions
• Subjectivity: The adaptable, self-regulating, resilient subject
• Power: Therapist becomes a social engineer; analysis becomes normalization
C. 1960s–80s: Rupture, Resistance, and the Return of the Real
Historical problem: What to do with the failure of normalization? How to respond to the crisis of the family, state, gender, and psychiatric power?
Strategic ruptures:
• Lacan in France: returns to Freud as radical, insists on the symbolic, the Real, language as the unconscious
• Anti-psychiatry (Laing, Cooper, Guattari): critiques psychoanalysis as part of carceral regime
• Feminist and poststructuralist critiques: What kind of subject does psychoanalysis produce? Who is excluded?
Dispositif:
• Discourse: Desire, lack, phallus, signifier, jouissance
• Institution: Lacanian schools, feminist clinics, schizoanalysis
• Subjectivity: The speaking subject caught in language, fantasy, and the Other
• Power: The analyst’s interpretation is destabilized; desire is not to be cured but explored
D. Neoliberal Turn: Therapy, Coaching, and Self-Optimization
Historical problem: How to manage anxiety, failure, and productivity in an individualized, market-driven society?
Strategic retooling:
• Psychoanalysis retreats from the mainstream; therapy becomes short-term, goal-oriented, behavioral
• Yet psychoanalytic language survives in self-help, cinema, and trauma discourse
Dispositif:
• Discourse: Self-esteem, trauma, healing, self-discovery
• Institution: Coaching, wellness industry, tech-mediated therapy
• Subjectivity: Entrepreneurial self; the wounded healer; the self as project
• Power: The subject governs themselves through therapeutic discourse
III. Genealogical Insight
Psychoanalysis is not a universal truth of the psyche—it is a historically contingent dispositif, produced and reconfigured in response to shifting problems of governance, pathology, gender, sexuality, and care.
• It was not discovered, but assembled.
• It does not reveal the self’s essence, but produces a certain kind of self.
• Its truth effects depend on institutions, rituals (the couch, free association), and relations of power.
IV. Why It Matters
Genealogy allows us to ask:
• What kind of subject is being produced by psychoanalytic discourse?
• Who does it serve, who does it exclude, and who does it normalize?
• What alternative discourses and practices have been subjugated or forgotten?
V. Conclusion
To study psychoanalysis genealogically is to:
• Refuse to treat it as the science of the soul
• Recognize it as a dispositif of power/knowledge
• Examine its strategic function in governing sexuality, subjectivity, and speech
• Open space for new configurations of listening, healing, and ethical relation
Would you like me to develop this into an academic paper structure, lecture outline, or comparative analysis (e.g. genealogy of psychoanalysis vs CBT or coaching discourse)?
