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The thesis of this paper is that Freud was Foucault's nemesis throughout his career, from his early psychological works through his late volumes on the care of the self. Foucault could not successfully refute Freud, but neither could he let go of him. So he was involved in a constant back-and-forth relationship with the founder of psychoanalysis which never found any equilibrium. Foucault tried to suppress the fact that as a student he was intensely interested in psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis and even considered a career somewhere in the Ψ-professions. But after a profound personal crisis, he turned on the field and wrote Madness and Civilization, an attack on it. But even here, he could not renounce Freud completely and ambivalently praised him. Throughout his "structuralist" period, Foucault presents himself as a friend of psychoanalysis, but the psychoanalysis he is supporting is not Freud's but Lacan's. Finally, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, purports to be a critique of Freud, but is in fact a critique of the Freudian Left he knew in Paris. It is a poorly argued book, and Freudian arguments are in fact never addressed.

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