The Panopticon’s ‘potential’ for surveillance nurtures self-discipline (causing individuals to ‘gaze upon themselves’) and self-discipline replaces torture as the ‘paradigmatic’ method of social control. Thus where persons themselves and their bodies are turned into ‘objects’, self-surveillance emerges as a practice of control. This practice is reflected in language (‘Watch yourself’), architecture and power relations. When people are treated as objects they see themselves as objects and tend to torture their bodies and desires to fit instructions and specifications. They evaluate their own behaviour and tend to become either docile subjects or rebellious subjects.
Foucault saw the development of psychoanalysis as a further repression of the self rather than as ‘a liberating step beyond the human sciences’. To Foucault (1981: 67), psychoanalysis was the ‘culmination of a normalising confessional technology’ first used by the early Catholic Church and which ensured that ‘sex’ as well as the ‘body’ became medicalised, psychiatrised, psychologised and hygienised. One could enter the ‘illness’ world and ‘disordered’ world via a variety of ‘new personages':
the nervous woman, the frigid wife, the indifferent mother — or worse the mother beset by murderous obsessions.. . the hysterical or neurasthenic girl, the precocious and already exhausted child ...
(Foucault 1981: 110)
Surveillance of the family under the gaze of the new professionals of psychiatry and psychology could turn up a variety of ways of ‘disturbed being’. Foucault (1981: 111) argues that the family from the mid-nineteenth century was compliant in this process:
the family broadcast the long complaint of its sexual sufferings to doctors, educators, psychiatrists, priests and pastors, to all the experts who would listen . . . [it] engaged in searching out the slightest forces of sexuality in its midst, wrenching from itself the most difficult confession, soliciting an audience with everyone who might know something about the matter and opening itself unreservedly to endless examination.
http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/eckerman.htm
Foucault saw the development of psychoanalysis as a further repression of the self rather than as ‘a liberating step beyond the human sciences’. To Foucault (1981: 67), psychoanalysis was the ‘culmination of a normalising confessional technology’ first used by the early Catholic Church and which ensured that ‘sex’ as well as the ‘body’ became medicalised, psychiatrised, psychologised and hygienised. One could enter the ‘illness’ world and ‘disordered’ world via a variety of ‘new personages':
the nervous woman, the frigid wife, the indifferent mother — or worse the mother beset by murderous obsessions.. . the hysterical or neurasthenic girl, the precocious and already exhausted child ...
(Foucault 1981: 110)
Surveillance of the family under the gaze of the new professionals of psychiatry and psychology could turn up a variety of ways of ‘disturbed being’. Foucault (1981: 111) argues that the family from the mid-nineteenth century was compliant in this process:
the family broadcast the long complaint of its sexual sufferings to doctors, educators, psychiatrists, priests and pastors, to all the experts who would listen . . . [it] engaged in searching out the slightest forces of sexuality in its midst, wrenching from itself the most difficult confession, soliciting an audience with everyone who might know something about the matter and opening itself unreservedly to endless examination.
http://www.academyanalyticarts.org/eckerman.htm
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