Psycho-medical expertise: the governmental interstice in the private/public, individual/society divide

• Main Author: Macleod, Catriona
• Language: English
• Published: Nova Science Publishers 2004
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014782; https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=442

The continued dominance of the individual/society and private/public dualisms in psychological theory and practice has been bemoaned by critical psychologists. What we need to understand, however, is that these dualisms are essential to maintaining psycho-medical expertise in its present position of authority in the power/knowledge nexus of the human condition. Drawing on Derridean and Foucauldian theory, this chapter explicates how psychomedical expertise re-produces these dualisms while at the same time providing the interstice between the individual and the social, the private and the public required for governmental concerns to be installed in the everyday lives of people. The argument is illustrated by examples of expertise surrounding teenage pregnancy. Issues of governmental security translate into the incentive to manage risk at the individual level. For this to occur the individual needs to be rendered as an object of government. Psycho-medical experts achieve this by providing the language needed to describe her/him (in intricate detail), the grids of visibility to bring him/her into the plane of sight, and calibrations of normalisation. This object, finally, is converted into a subject of self-government who monitors and regulates him/herself and renders him/herself true to him/herself in confession to the expert. Psychomedical expertise is as much part of political power as are the formal bureaucratic instruments of government. However, this power is simultaneously masked and made possible by the individual/society and private/public divides. === Full text available on publisher site: https://www.novapublishers.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=442