A Psicanálise e o Cuidado de Si: questões preliminares a toda aproximação possível

Abstract

The present work aims to investigate the relation between Psychoanalysis and the Care of the Self. By "Care of the Self," the French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out the existence of another relation, completely different from the modern one, between the subject and the truth, preponderant throughout the entire Greco-Roman culture. In one of his last courses at the Collège de France, entitled The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault proposes a direct approximation between Psychoanalysis and this ancient tradition, by directly affirming that Lacan retakes the demands placed in the center of this tradition: the way truth is capable of modifying the subject and the price that the subject must pay to gain access to the truth. In fact, it is known that Lacan did not cease to speak about the subject and about the truth throughout his teaching. However, although it seems that Foucault only subscribes to what Lacan has already said, a more detailed investigation of his interpretation is required. From the start, we notice that two of Lacan's theoretical elaborations directly antagonizes the possible approximation of Psychoanalysis with the Care of the Self tradition. The first one can be found in the statement in which the French psychoanalyst links the subject of Psychoanalysis to the subject founded by modern science. The second one can be found in his critique of Aristotelian ethics; and the way he uses Aristotle s elaboration in order to radically differentiate it from the psychoanalytic ethics, what indicates that there is at least one direct criticism, made by Lacan, to an ancient ethic system. The subject and the ethics, thus, appear as two foundamental questions regarding any preliminary approximation between Psychoanalysis and the Care of the Self. We aim, through these two themes, to evaluate, from the point of view of Psychoanalysis, if this provocative approach carried out by Foucault can be considered accurate