Michel Foucault e la Daseinsanalyse : un’indagine metodologica

International audienceThis work analyzes the methodological role that Ludwig Binswanger’s phenomenological approach to psychopathology played for the epistemological methodology outlined by Michel Foucault at the beginning of the 1960s. Starting from the young Foucault’s interest in existential psychiatry, the analysis focuses especially on the French philosophical and psychiatric context in which Foucault’s Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s “Dream and Existence” (1954) was conceived. The intention of this study is not to compare Foucault’s conceptuality to Binswanger’s. Rather, the aim is to investigate Foucault’s reading of Daseinsanalysis by questioning the epistemological stakes that motivate it in the field of the French philosophically informed psychiatry of the time. Foucault himself refers to such a context in his Introduction of 1954, by announcing a study aiming at “situating the existential analysis within the present development of the investigation of man...by following the inclination of phenomenology toward anthropology.”At the core of my analysis is the concept of “historical a priori.” I argue that this concept is rooted not in purely philosophical phenomenology, but in the analysis of ‘existence,’ whose model was given to Foucault—especially via Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Canguilhem—by the “structural a priori” that phenomenological psychiatry borrowed from the medical anthropologies of such authors as Kurt Goldstein, Frederik J. J. Buytendijk, Erwin Straus, and Viktor von Weizsäcker—whose main work, Der Gestaltkreis (1940), was translated into French by Foucault in 1958. Like Weizsäcker had designated the Gestaltkreis as the “empirical a priori” that would have made it possible to account for the existence of the living being, so Foucault presents Binswanger’s approach to the forms of existence by stressing at the same time its “original opposition to a science of the human facts according to the positivistic style,” and its distance from a purely “a priori philosophical speculation” (Introduction to “Dream and Existence”). Approaching the forms of existence as forms of Dasein means indeed to grasp in existence itself a “direction for experience” that is at the same time the structure of a pathological form, and the key for understanding it. It is a matter of a transcendentality that presents itself at the same time as a tool, as a grid targeted to diagnose a particular pathological configuration, and as a configuration principle to be diagnosed by means of such a diagnosis which bases itself on it.This work is outstanding for two reasons: on the one hand, it has contributed to the knowledge of the first part of Foucault’s thought, that is his writings on psychopathology and the history of psychology. In general, indeed, the relationship between Foucault and Binswanger appeared to be quite marginal compared to the strictly anti-anthropological and anti-phenomenological turn that characterizes Foucault’s thought since the 1960s. Especially to the extent that Dream and Existence has a crucial role within Binswanger’s corpus, insofar as the Swiss psychiatrist expressed there for the first time his philosophical ambition of combining Heidegger’s phenomenological analytics with psychopathology. On the other hand, the epistemological and multidisciplinary approach of my study opened a new way of considering Binswanger’s existential project, a way that is different from those traditional interpretations, according to which the Daseinsanalyse would be merely a purely phenomenological-existentialist model grounded on anti-naturalistic assumptions