Genealogy of confession: From the spectacle of penance to the exhibiting man

Drawing on Michel Foucault’s genealogical approach, this article examines the transformation of the “confession ritual” across four historical stages: “public penance” in early Christianity, “examination of self and confession” in the Middle Ages, “Freud’s cathartic method” in the late nineteenth centuries, and finally the emergence of the “exhibiting man” in the age of digital social networks. The main argument is that in the Christian era, confession evolved from an external, collective ritual into a technique of the self, compelling the subject to ceaselessly speak their own truth. With the onset of modernity, the technique of examination and confession did not disappear. The article then discusses two applications of the confession technique in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Freud’s cathartic method in psychoanalysis, and the “exhibiting man” in the digital age.



Freudian psychoanalysis inherits the one sided structure of priest confessor; however, with the expansion of digital social networks, this structure broadens and transforms into the “exhibiting man” – a person who, not out of compulsion but out of self willed desire, displays the most intimate aspects of their life not before a single individual (priest or psychoanalyst) but before a mass of spectators. The article shows that this voluntary transparency and visibility does not strengthen the subject’s freedom of action and thought; rather, it traps them in new mechanisms of subjugation, including “surveillance capitalism” and the imperative to be seen. It suggests that a return to “care of the self” and the right to silence, as a form of resistance against the compulsion to constant confession, may be one of the key options for liberation from this situation.