Care of the self
The phrase the ancients used was epimeleia heautou: care of oneself. Michel Foucault gave his 1981–1982 course at the Collège de France to it, published as The Hermeneutics of the Subject. He begins with a correction.
The maxim we remember from Delphi is know yourself. In the texts where it appears, Foucault says, it is the smaller of two instructions. Socrates, in Plato's Alcibiades, tells a young man about to enter politics to attend to himself first. Knowing yourself is a move inside that larger task, not the task.
Not an attitude
Foucault describes the care of the self as
"an attitude towards the self, others, and the world"
— Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, lecture of 6 January 1982
and then spends the course keeping the word attitude from going soft. What he found in the Greek and Roman material was a timetable. Reading with a purpose, writing at the end of the day, rehearsing hardship before it arrives, going back over the day in the evening in order.
The practices had names, teachers and hours. A person did them the way a person now does physiotherapy, not because the exercise feels restorative but because the effect comes from repeating it for years.
Why it needed another person
None of it was solitary. There is always a second party in these texts: the philosophical director, the friend who speaks frankly, Seneca writing to Lucilius. Foucault reads that as structural rather than sentimental. Someone examining himself alone inspects what he already agrees with. It takes another person to ask the question that has not occurred to him.
What Foucault was after
He was not recommending Stoicism. He was showing that a self has been formed in other ways than by confession, and that the modern reflex, dig up the truth hidden inside and be freed by saying it, is one historical arrangement among several.
That is what makes the ancient practice an awkward ancestor for therapy. What passed between a person and his director was work, done on a schedule, meant to change what he was. It was not a report on an interior.
The question the phrase leaves is a practical one. What in my life is arranged to change me rather than to describe me?
Epimelea takes its name from this phrase. It is a therapy app built around the existential school. Sessions carry over from one to the next, and the archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.