The most cited scholar in the humanities was once an isolated student who decorated his dorm with macabre Spanish torture art, chased a classmate with a dagger, and struggled with suicidal ideation under the crushing taboos facing a gay man in 1940s France. This episode argues that the youth of Michel Foucault is the key to his work. Born in Poitiers in 1926 to a stern surgeon father who named him Paul, and a mother who insisted on Michel, he was sent to a psychiatrist at Sainte-Anne hospital after suicide attempts, an encounter with medical authority that armed him rather than breaking him.

The hosts follow his brief membership in the French Communist Party, his return to Sainte-Anne as an unofficial intern observing the doctors instead of the patients, his discovery of Nietzsche, and postings in Sweden, West Germany, and Poland, where a h ...