Search results for "care of the self"

What is Experience? : Foucauldian Perspectives

2019

Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) thought is widely used in the humanities and social sciences for investigating experiences of madness, illness, marginalization and social conflicts. However, the meaning of the word “experience” is not always clearly defined, and the French word expérience has a whole variety of meanings. In this article I explicate Foucault’s most relevant concepts of experience and their theoretical functions. He refers to experience throughout his career, especially in his early texts on existential psychiatry from the 1950s and 1960s and in his late work from the 1980s. Texts such as Mental Illness and Psychology and Dire vrai sur soi-même have received less attention than…