Is hermeneutics of the Self a Pathological Disorder? (A symptomatology in Foucault’s work)

The hermeneutic of the self concept in Foucault’s workprovided a condition for a new form of his study, an analysisof the relationship between truth and the subject, and the development of knowledge into the mechanisms of self-care. For Foucault, the hermeneutics of the subject, unlike its traditional technologies, is not a simple form of an act of self-care to achieve some degree of moral excellence; rather, it formulates and processes the entire humanities system, modern literature, and related sciences. Here it is no longer an external coercion to reveal and interpret oneself, but a kind of morbid desire to empty the inner secrets as a text, and in the presence of the symbolic. This excessive and deviant longing for the symbolic, which targets passive articulation of the subject's desire, can be symptomatic as a pathological thing. In the present study, five clinical symptoms including introspection, narcissistic aspect, masochism, obsession and femininity of language were identified in Foucault's hermeneutics of the subject and within the framework of Freudian psychoanalytic principles. Symptoms that all have neurotic aspects and indicate that hermeneutics can be placed in the category of neuroses in the classification of desire disorders. A disorder whose fundamental characteristic is the defeat of the ego (unconsciousness) as the geometric location of the principle of pleasure, against the principle of reality and its external manifestations (culture, ethics, law, etc.).