Philosophy and Psychology

I thought the discussion of "psychological totalitarianism" was very interesting in regards to the impact of the discovery of the unconscious. Specifically I'm referring to the part of the text were Foucault says that "the old distinction of the soul and the body...no longer exists, now that we know that our body forms part of our psyche (108 of the packet)." This reminded me a lot of the reading earlier in the class about the transformation of the penal system from punishment directly on the body to punishment enacted upon the soul/psyche. As read then and reexplained here, there is actually a direct connection between the two, such that action taken upon the soul directly produces action upon the body (remember the quote about the soul as the prison of the body). That said, I think this new text goes a step further by framing the 'science' of the unconsciousness as a text that needs to be decoded. Here, however, I found the discussion of the text of the unconscious as providing its own code kind of confusing. For example, Foucault says that "one can never be sure that one has obtained the final text, that what one has obtained doesn't mean something else behind what it means (109) ." I guess given that some form of absolute determination of what the text of the unconscious means is impossible, then what's the point of trying to decode the unconscious in the first place? I suppose the point is to enable the extension of control over the domain of all the sciences as Foucault mentions, as well as for the transformation to action upon the soul (the penal system example), but why do we (the general populace) buy into this game of trying to uncover the hidden meaning of the unconscious when our efforts will forever be futile?

Now that I consider this proposition/question, however, I guess it revolves around the notion of interpretation and the subsequent manifestation of experts. Here, the expert is the person who supposedly best understands the code of the unconscious text and has a monopoly on acceptable interpretations of what the unconscious means. And, this conception of expert knowledge extends beyond the unconscious to psychology as a whole, for psychology "is always a question of what can be known about man." So then, it seems, psychology and the discovery of the unconscious extends the power/knowledge dynamic, whereby the amount of knowledge one possesses directly translates into the power s/he can exercise over others.