La médicalisation de la sexualité. Foucault et Lantéri-Laura : un débat qui n'a pas eu lieu

Lanteri Laura's book : Reading perversion : a history of its medical appropriation (Lecture des perversions : une histoire de leur appropriation médicale) was published in 1979, three years after Michel Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality. These two books deal with the history of sexuality in the XIX° century, yet strangely Lanteri Laura does not cite Foucault. A close reading of both texts demonstrates two points. (1) While Foucault was mainly concerned with the relationship between sexuality and truth, power and knowledge, Lantéri-Laura worked more specifically on sexual perversions and the way in which psychiatry redefined them by withdrawing them from the fields of religion and law. (2) Moreover, Foucault did not undertake a critical analysis of psychoanalysis. Instead, he used the psychoanalytic model to construct the model of of the “apparatus of sexuality” based on language. For his part, Lanteri Laura provided evidence of the limited withdrawal of Freud reagrading the sexological categories of his time and a return within lacanian psychoanalysis to categories that were anchored in the dominant social morality of the time. Finally, whereas Lantéri-Laura attempted to objectify psychoanalysis and to place it within a historical and ideological perspective, Foucault was in the end actively inspired by the psychoanalytical model and used it in the social and historical construction of sexuality.