Foucault Versus Freud - Oedipal Theory and the Deployment of Sexuality

In Foucault Versus Freud, Jerome C. Wakefield offers a novel analysis of one of the great intellectual clashes of our times, the attack on Sigmund Freud''s influential sexual theories by the eminent French philosopher and historian of ideas Michel Foucault.

Starting from Foucault''s question, "What makes the psychoanalytic theory of incest acceptable to the bourgeois family?", and drawing on Foucault''s relatively unexplored published lectures as well as his celebrated History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Wakefield evaluates Foucault''s argument that there is a continuity between the two-century medical anti-masturbation crusade and Freud''s theory, providing the reader with an accessible introduction to Foucault''s conceptual innovations including power/knowledge, the deployment of sexuality, and the use of surveillance and confession as tactics in medicalizing sexuality and reshaping family life.

Rather than allowing the argument to stay at th