«Foucault started out as a student of Heideggerian existential psychiatry. His first published work, a one hundred page introduction to Binswanger's Dreams and Existence (1954), begins by setting out and defending Heidegger's account of human existence, or Dasein, in Being and Time. In this account, there is no human nature. Rather, "human being" is a self-interpreting way of being whose practices have enable it to act as if it had a whole series of different natures in the course of history. To understand Heidegger's claim, it helps to remember that, in Homeric times, there were ways of singing of heroes and so men could become heroes. Later, in Christian times, there were practices for cannonizing saints so men could become saints. At the time of Homer, there could be no saints but only pathetic losers who let people walk all over them, and, conversely, in Medieval times there could be no heroes but only prideful individuals who disrupted society by denying their dependence on God. Or, to take an example from Foucault's History of Sexuality, in Antiquity in some groups men took care of themselves by taking care their actions were in keeping with the laws of health and society, while in another, confessional practices produced a new type of man who identified himself with his desires, and then, since his desires might be the disguised work of the devil, developed a hermeneutic of suspicion to ferret out their true meaning.»

— Hubert Dreyfus. Foucault's Critique of Psychiatric Medicine

«Consider the young, devout, and extremely pious monk [Martin] Luther. So dedicated was he to eradicating all trace of sin in his soul that he worked constantly to purify himself. Indeed, he became obsessed with the identification and confession of personal sin. No doubt at least some of the traditional stories about the young Luther are false. But they are telling nevertheless. They describe Luther as a pious, innocent young monk who was so obsessed with the purity of his soul that he once kept his confessor for six hours to hear the full recitation of his sins. A monk who—at least once after a long and satisfying confession—rushed back to the booth to confess the hint of pride that had crept into his mind at the thought of the lengthy confession he had just offered! They describe a frustrated Johann von Staupitz, Luther’s wise and patient confessor, who finally rebuked Luther for his incessant visits to the confessional, complaining, “You must get a hold of yourself, Martin. Every time you fart you want to make confession of your sins.” Apparently Staupitz did finally reach the end of his rope: “Quit coming to me with these puppy confessions, Luther,” he shouted. “Go kill your father or something—then we’ll have a sin to talk about!»

— Hubert Dreyfus. All Things Shining

попался 👀

«In his later work, however, when Foucault focuses on the social effects of the sciences of man rather than on their selfdefeating attempt to recuperate the unthought into the cogito, he comes to see psychoanalysis not as a liberating step beyond the human sciences, but as the culmination of a normalizing confessional technology developed by the early Christians. In the lectures and interviews reflecting the not yet published Confessions of the Flesh, Foucault argues that Christian confessional practices produced a being he calls 'the man of desires'. This Christian man identifed himself not with his public deeds but with his most private intentions, desires, fantasies, and dreams. Moreover, since what one desired might well be forbidden and thus the desire disguised, one had to be suspicious of one's desires and constantly work to dredge up one's true motivations. Foucault quotes a confession manual: "Examine .. . all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all your actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them your consent. And finally, do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial or insignificant" (1978, p. 20). This is the motto of the hermeneutic subjects we have all become. […]

"We convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject, that, through inertia or submissiveness,we conceal from ourselves the blinding evidence, and that what is essential always eludes us, so that we must always start out once again in search of it" (1978, p. 33). Thus, in principle, Freudian theory advocates the interminable analysis of one's desires, fantasies, and dreams and so contributes to the practices that tend to make everyone into self-normalizing subjects. Each person is led to seek the truth about himself, and thus to assure that all his actions and even his thoughts in every area of life do not deviate from what science has shown to be normal, healthy, and productive. […]

What makes Freudian theory dangerous, according to Foucault, is that such self-inspection is not confined to a period of therapy when dealing with a specific problem. Rather it is supposed to be based on a science of the psyche that holds that relentless self-inspection must be practiced as a permanent way of life if one is to become and remain a mature and healthy human being.[…]

Acording to Foucault, this endless self-analysis, in which each private subject is urged to speak so as to make itself available to inspection and correction, has become not our cure, but our curse.»

— Hubert Dreyfus. Foucault's Critique of Psychiatric Medicine

“Если в книге ничего не понятно, то читать ее нельзя, если в книге все понятно, то читать ее не надо”

«two fundamentally opposed but complementary views of the mind. I will call these alternative conceptions of the mind and of psychopathology, epistemological and ontological, and will contrast Freud’s fundamentally epistemological approach with Merleau-Ponty’s ontological account.

The epistemological conception of mind is roughly that the mind contains ideas which correspond or sometimes fail to correspond to what is out there in the world. This view of the mind as a subjective consciousness containing representations of objects begins with Descartes and reaches its culmination in Franz Brentano’s notion of intentionality. According to Brentano, mental states such as perception, memory, desire, intention, fear, etc. are all "of" something, or "about" something. It is this directedness, or intentionality, Brentano claimed, which is characteristic of the mind and of nothing else.

Brentano had many famous students. One of these, Edmund Husserl, developed an elaborate account of the sort of representations which would have to be in the mind for the mind to be about anything. He called the special attitude in which the mind is able to reflect on its own intentional content instead of on the objects towards which it is directed, the "phenomenological reduction," and the account of the structure of the mental representations discovered by this method he called "phenomenology."

Another student who followed Brentano’s courses in Vienna was Sigmund Freud. He also accepted the intentionalist conception of mind as directed towards objects by means of representations. But, unlike Husserl, Freud learned from his work with hypnotism that not every mental representation was immediately accessible to reflection. Thus Freud was led to introduce the notion of an unconscious which, just like the conscious mind, was directed towards objects by means of its representations, but whose representations were not directly accessible to the conscious subject.»

— Hubert Dreyfus. Alternative Philosophical Conceptualizations Of Psychopathology

«Recently philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, reacting against the Cartesian tradition, have developed an alternative model of the mind`s relation to reality. This account is so radical that, strictly speaking, they do not refer to the mind at all. Rather they prefer to speak of the way that the whole human being is related to the world. Indeed, even "relation" is misleading, since it suggests the coming together of two separate entities -- human being and world -- so these recent philosophers are finally driven to replace the epistemological relation of subject and object with a way of being they call "being-in-the-world".

These philosophers do not deny that human beings have mental states by which their minds are directed towards objects, rather they assert that mental states presuppose a context in which objects can show up and make sense. According to Heidegger, this context is provided by social practices. The shared practices into which we are socialized provide a background understanding of what counts as objects, what counts as human beings and ultimately what counts as real, on the basis of which we can direct our minds towards particular things and people. Heidegger calls this background understanding of what it means to be, which is embodied in the tools and institutions of a society and in each person growing up in that society but not represented in his/her mind, the understanding of Being. According to Heidegger it is this understanding of Being which creates what he calls a clearing (Lichtung) in which entities can then show up for us. The clearing is neither on the side of the subject nor the object -- it is not a belief system nor a set of facts -- rather it contains both and makes their relation possible.

Merleau-Ponty, following Heidegger, compares this clearing to the illumination in a room which makes directedness towards objects possible but is not itself an object towards which the eye can be directed. He argues that this clearing is correlated with our bodily skills, and thus with the stance we take towards people and things. Each person not only incorporates his culture, but also his sub-culture and the understanding of human beings and of objects which is his family`s variation of the current social practices. Finally, each person has his or her own embodied understanding of what counts as real, which is, of course, not private but is a variation on the shared public world.»

— Hubert Dreyfus. Alternative Philosophical Conceptualizations Of Psychopathology

«Wittgenstein’s methods are for loosening the grip of misleading pictures and analogies, which hold our thinking in a cramp and stand in the way of our recognising the extraordinariness of the ordinary. The particular pictures that we fix on are rooted in our human way of life and culture, and therefore connected to our desires, fears and aspirations. They may be the expression of a wish to control the seemingly arbitrary world, especially if our childhood experiences were chaotic and unjust. […]

When we seek knowledge and explanations of mental conflict, we are caught in a confusion whose character is not transparent to us. We are driven by a wish to find an explanation for the conflict, as if that will enable us to cure it. But this search for an answer is also the driving force in the conflict; we need to be liberated from the persistent inclination to seek answers to all questions.»

— John Heaton. The Talking Cure: Wittgenstein's Therapeutic Method for Psychotherapy

не такая смешная, как две предыдущие в этом списке, но тоже хорошая книга. По крайней мере обложка

Оказалось, автор фразы “Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it” —Reinhold Niebuhr. Ему же приписывается знаменитое “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”