Social discipline: concepts, mechanisms, and societal effects

Freud & Foucault: Comparing Two Theories of Human Behavior

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), and linguistic anthropologist Michel Foucault (1926-1984), came from two different European cities (Freud from Vienna; Foucault from Paris) lived at different times, and developed entirely different theories of human behavior. Freud believed human drives and impulses originate from the unconscious; and external social repression of unconscious impulses (early messages about "right" and "wrong" from parents, teachers, other authority figures, and from society) give way to internal formation of the id (unconscious desire); the ego (a person's sense of who he or she is); and the superego (an internalized parent constantly reminding the individual, based on early socialization, of what is the "right" thing to do, instead of the "wrong" thing, in terms of society's expectations of the individual). It is in fact the id/ego/superego theory for which Freud is best known.

Freud also believed, in relationship to the id/ego/superego theory, that all human drives and desires originate (in infancy) with sexual desires and impulses, and that learned repression of those sexual impulses (begun in later childhood, and reinforced throughout life) is what causes development of the three building blocks of the human personality, the id, the ego, and the superego. If the means of repression of a child's innate sexual desires and instincts is too stringent, however, or otherwise unhealthy, according to Freud's theory, this individual will develop neuroses. (It was adults with such neuroses that Freud treated in his Vienna psychoanalytic clinics in the first two or three decades of the 20th century, and about whom his various well-known case histories (e.g., Dora; The Man with Wolves; the Man with Rats, etc.) were written.

Another key aspect of Freud's theory of the unconscious had to do with the interpretation of dreams. Freud believed that the content of people's dreams represents a sort of window into the human unconscious, and that the material of dreams (or what people can remember of it) is symbolic, usually in a way that can be tied to sexuality. For example, in one of Freud's earliest case histories, Dora (1905), when Dora dreams her house is on fire, Freud interprets the fire as a symbol of sexuality. All in all, the idea that the human unconscious encourages, mediates, and represses behavior is the cornerstone of Freud's theory.

Foucault's theory was completely different. It had to do with the power and limitations of human language, or (as he called language, language communications, and language systems, "discourses." His central thesis, about which he wrote several books in the 1970's and 1980's, including The archaeology of knowledge (1972) and Power/Knowledge (1980) is that human language, or discourses, never exist entirely on their own, but that the real meaning of spoken, written, or otherwise communicated discourses depend on the context(s) within which particular discourses are communicated (that is, the social and/or hierarchical situation within which language is communicated) and on relationships of power between or among speakers (or writers).

Foucault's theory of human discourses holds that, the same conversation could be held between, say, two friends, and between an employer and employee, and the implied meaning of each conversation would be different, based on the context of the conversation, and on the relationship of power (or of equality, in the case of two friends), between the two speakers. A brief example of such a conversation might be:

Speaker One: I really need to finish up this project by the end of today. Will you help me?

Speaker Two: Of course.