Power, Systems, and the Stories We’re Living Inside: Reflections on Foucault
Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality
By Michel Foucault (Read 2025 & 2007)
Some books aren’t “self-help” or clinical manuals, but they still deeply shape how we understand people, systems, and suffering. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality fall into that category for me.
I was first introduced to Foucault at Williams College, and recently returned to his work out of curiosity, rereading Discipline and Punish. Both books were, at times, slow and dense—definitely not easy reads—but the ideas themselves were compelling and have stayed with me long after finishing.
They’re not books I would hand to most clients directly. But they are books that quietly influence how I think as a therapist: how I understand power, norms, shame, institutions, and the invisible systems shaping our lives.
What Foucault Is Exploring
At the heart of both books is a simple but profound question:
How do systems shape what we believe is “normal,” “healthy,” “moral,” or “acceptable”?
Rather than seeing power as something only held by governments or authority figures, Foucault suggests that power is everywhere—woven into institutions, language, medicine, schools, prisons, and even the ways we talk about ourselves.
His work asks us to notice that many things we treat as “natural” or “just the way things are” are actually historically constructed.
Discipline and Punish: How We Learn to Police Ourselves
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the shift from public punishment (like executions or torture) to modern systems of surveillance and control—prisons, schools, hospitals, and bureaucracies.
His argument isn’t simply that punishment changed form. It’s that society moved toward something subtler and, in many ways, more pervasive.
Instead of controlling people through fear alone, modern systems shape behavior through:
observation
rules and routines
constant evaluation
internalized self-monitoring
His famous metaphor of the panopticon—a prison design where inmates never know when they’re being watched—illustrates this. Eventually, people begin to monitor themselves automatically.
In other words, we don’t just get controlled from the outside.
We learn to control ourselves.
Reading this through a therapeutic lens, it’s hard not to see connections to:
shame
perfectionism
masking
internalized “shoulds”
self-surveillance and self-criticism
Many clients aren’t simply “unmotivated” or “resistant.” They’re navigating systems that have taught them to constantly evaluate, compare, and discipline themselves.
The History of Sexuality: How Power Shapes Identity
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault challenges the idea that sexuality was historically repressed and then later liberated. Instead, he argues that modern society actually talks about sex constantly—but in ways that categorize, label, and regulate people.
Through medicine, psychology, and institutions, sexuality became something to:
diagnose
define
classify
manage
He shows how identities like “homosexual,” for example, weren’t simply discovered—they were constructed through systems of knowledge and control.
This lens helps us see how language, diagnosis, and even care systems can shape identity in powerful ways.
For me, this connects strongly to:
queer and gender-expansive experiences
medicalization of difference
diagnostic labels
how people internalize narratives about what’s “normal”
It invites the question:
Who benefits from these categories—and who is constrained by them?
Why a Therapist Might Read Foucault
At first glance, these books may feel far removed from therapy. But for me, they offer something essential: context.
They remind me that people’s struggles don’t exist in isolation.
When someone comes into therapy feeling:
ashamed
“not good enough”
pathologized
watched
judged
like they’re failing at life
It’s rarely just personal.
It’s often systemic.
Foucault’s work helps me hold a wider frame:
How have institutions shaped this person’s story?
What norms are they measuring themselves against?
Where did these standards come from?
Who decided what “healthy” or “productive” means?
Understanding power dynamics helps therapy feel less like fixing individuals and more like supporting people inside complex systems.
A Personal Reflection (and Critique)
That said, these books are not without limitations.
They were written decades ago, by a man in a position of significant intellectual and social power, largely writing for other men in similar positions. And that shows.
At times, the work feels abstract, detached from lived experience, and incomplete when viewed through contemporary lenses like:
feminism
queer theory
disability justice
race and class analysis
trauma-informed care
While Foucault offers a powerful critique of systems, he doesn’t always fully address how those systems intersect with gender, race, or class in the ways we understand today.
So I hold his work lightly.
Not as gospel, but as a foundation—one piece of a much larger conversation that many thinkers since have expanded and complicated.
Closing Reflection
Reading Foucault didn’t give me clinical tools or interventions. Instead, it gave me language and perspective.
It helped me remember that many of the pressures people feel aren’t personal failures—they’re responses to invisible systems we’ve all been living inside.
For me, that awareness fosters compassion.
And compassion—both personal and collective—is often where healing begins.