While Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex is concerned with psycho-sexual development, it concomitantly presents a novel historical-political imagination. This article compares the post-Oedipal self with the selves envisioned by Nietzsche and Marx, suggesting that while these 19th-century theorists constructed selves that are able to transcend the normalizing and subjugating circumstances of modernity, Freud’s theory defines a healthy self as irredeemably embedded in the prevailing culture and life-orders. In making his case, Freud spurns the quests of Nietzsche and Marx for (...) wholeness of the individual and for self-authorship, and presents the self as structurally agonistic, riven and thoroughly molded by society. (shrink)

Is mental illness an object of knowledge? The history of psychiatry teaches us to doubt it, by emphasizing the infinitely variable and fluctuating character of psychiatric entities. Mental illness is not simply ‘out there’, waiting to be described and theorized by psychiatrists; it interacts with psychiatric theories, clinical entities waxing and waning in accordance with diagnostic fashions, institutional practices and methods of treatment. This should be a warning to psychiatrists and therapists: their intervention is part of the ‘etiological equation’ of (...) the syndromes that they claim to observe from the outside. But this should also be a warning to historians of psychiatry, who can no longer be content with writing the history of ready-made syndromes and psychiatric theories. They must, if they want to remain faithful to their improbable ‘object’, study the complex interactions from which those syndromes and those theories emerge, somewhere between the doctors, the patients and the society that surrounds them. In short, they must study the making of psychiatric history, and understand that they participate in it. (shrink)