> Is this about Foucault? I could swear he wrote about prisons,
> clinics, sexuality - actual institutions, actual people with
> authority acting on actual physical bodies and subordinate
> populations. It would be a bit of "vul[g]ar Platonism" if he'd just
> riffed about Power. But he didn't. You may not like what he had to
> say, but please give some sign of having read it.
There are other approaches to understanding the psychopathology of institutions.
Kleinian psychoanalysis, for instance, has been made the basis for studies attempting to understand institutions as "containers of anxiety, " studies exemplified by Isabel Menzies Lyth's two volume collection of essays: "Containing Anxiety in Institutions" and "The Dynamics of the Social."
This approach allows for a continuum of personality structures with a very weak unintegrated ego at the most irrational and a strong integrated ego at the most rational end.
The continuum is also characterized by differences in the dominant form of anxiety and "conscience" moving from fear of persecution ("paranoid" anxiety) and an "authoritarian" conscience at one end to fear of loss of a loved object ("depressive" anxiety) and a "humanist" conscience at the other.
The Kevin Kline character in the 2001 film "Life is a House" illustrates a personality functioning at the strong integrated ego end of the continuum. Kurasowa's films also provide excellent illustrations of the ideas involved, e.g. "Ikiru," the story of a person seeking, having discovered he has terminal stomach cancer, to discover what it would mean "to live" (Goethe's Faust providing the inspiration), "Throne of Blood," the story of a character at the extreme psychopathological end (based on Shakespeare's Macbeth) and Rashoman, accounts of the same event by four different characters from what amount to different positions on the continuum, the least delusional most realistic account being given by the character closest to the "humanist" end.
This approach assumes it's possible to know reality as it is in itself (while explaining why this is extremely difficult). Consequently, it isn't self-contradictory in the way any approach making claims about reality as it is in itself while assuming that this reality is unknowable is.
Ted