Verdade e Loucura nos primeiros escritos de Michel Foucault

Abstract

We intend to reflect briefly on the relationships drawn between truth, madness and psychology from the work of Michel Foucault, specifically the texts from the 1950’s to de History of madness of 1961. We believe that Foucault’s thinking, starting in the 1960’s, elaborates a critique of the traditional notion of the subject, understood as the foundation of knowledge. However, in the little-known texts of 1954, Introduction (In: Binswanger) and Maladie mentale et personnalité, we can witness attempts to justify psychology through what we intend to elucidate as the outline of a fundamental anthropology (an elaboration of a “science of man” in its most extensive philosophical sense) of phenomenological and marxist inspiration. Already in the texts that go to the archeological thought of the beginning of the 1960’s, as his secondary thesis of doctoral published under the title Genesis and structure of Kant’s Anthropology, there arises a distancing and a rupture with any foundation proposal. In our reading, we will try to maintain that this movement of rupture and discontinuity existing between the texts of the 1960s and those of 1954 should be clarified in the light of what the philosopher identified in the modernity as an anthropological sleep. If in the 1954 texts the relation between madness and truth should be affirmed in psychology by the elaboration of a fundamental knowledge of man; now, from the 1960s, the foundationalist proposal gives way to a critical perspective in which the relation between madness and truth in psychology comes to be understood in terms of anthropological illusion. This concept, anthropological illusion, constitutes a central element for the understanding of the development of foucaultian philosophy, as well as pointing to the part that would have led to the formulation of the present criticism in History of madness, a work that premiered Archeology itself.