Is Foucauldian Psychotherapy Possible?RethinkingTherapeutic Power

This article reexamines Michel Foucault’s lifelong engagement with psychotherapy and responds to the question posed by Hubert Dreyfus: “Is there a kind of psychotherapy Foucault would positively recommend?” Foucault is often regarded as a categorical critic of psychotherapy. However, the recently published 1950s manuscript Binswanger and Existential Analysis revealed that young Foucault was deeply invested in existential analysis and sought to reform psychopathology and therapeutic practice from within. He later shifted to a position in which he forcefully condemned all forms of psychotherapy as disciplinary practices aimed at compelling the subject to conform to normative frameworks. Nevertheless, he continued to reflect on what a desirable form of psychotherapy might be. Moreover, in his final years, Foucault developed a series of studies on “practice of the self,” which he understood as a mode of subject formation distinct from discipline. He analyzed the process by which the subject becomes free and autonomous through the very effects of the power relation with the other. Although the theory of practice of the self does not directly address psychotherapy, I argue that its reconceptualization of power—not as repression but as a catalyst for self-transformation—offers significant insights into non-disciplinary forms of psychotherapy, particularly regarding the configuration of power relations within them.