'The impossible professions': Freud and Foucault on doctors, educators, and ethical subjectivity (Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault)

What relationship of authority educates individuals to make use of their freedom and learn to become independent? Such is the paradoxical task liberalism must face in cultivating its citizens to be ethically independent and capable of public engagement. I argue that the "impossible professions" of politics, pedagogy, and psychoanalysis each elaborate a project both educational and political in nature: that of preparing individuals to cultivate and ethically exercise their political liberty as citizens. My dissertation treats Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault's modern reconsideration of this Kantian project, and argues that authoritative relationships---rather than institutional schooling---promote the critical reflection and ethical engagement critical to individual self-governance. Freud contributes an ethical disposition that recovers the place for risk in everyday actions, and the recognition that this disposition is best cultivated through relationships to authority. Foucault's late unpublished lectures on parrhesia (fearless speech) refine this ethical disposition, and contribute a model for truth-telling that does not oblige individuals to claim special access to truth but instead evaluates truth claims through risky, individual confrontations. The result is an ethical subject whose definition derives primarily from practice, rather than knowledge. I argue that, for each thinker, doctors and educators serve as important intermediaries between private practices of self-fashioning and public ethical engagement. I further argue that Freud and Foucault, while critical of classical liberalism and Kant's moral universalism, build on Kant's efforts to link individual self-governance to political governance. Consequently, Freud and Foucault should be considered in light of early liberal projects in "moral education," a tradition that is distinct from and better suited to address the intersection of ethics and politics than contemporary work on "democratic education."...