Problematization is a process of stripping away common or conventional understandings of a subject matter in order to gain new insights. This method can be applied to a term, writing, opinion, ideology, identity, or person. Practitioners consider the concrete or existential elements of these subjects. Analyzed as challenges (problems), practitioners may seek to transform the situations under study. It is a method of defamiliarization of common sense.

Problematization is a critical thinking and pedagogical dialogue or process and may be considered demythicisation. Rather than taking the common knowledge (myth) of a situation for granted, problematization poses that knowledge as a problem, allowing new viewpoints, consciousness, reflection, hope, and action to emerge.

What may make problematization different from other forms of criticism is its target, the context and details, rather than the pro or con of an argument. More importantly, this criticism does not take place within the original context or argument, but draws back from it, re-evaluates it, leading to action which changes the situation. Rather than accepting the situation, one emerges from it, abandoning a focalised viewpoint.

To problematize a statement, for example, one asks simple questions:

For Michel Foucault, problematization serves as the overarching concept of his work in "History of Madness".

He treats it both as an object of inquiry and a specific form of critical analysis. As an object of inquiry, problematization is described as a process of objects becoming problems by being “characterized, analyzed, and treated” as such.

As a form of analysis, problematization seeks to answer the questions of “how and why certain things (behavior; phenomena, processes) became a problem”. Foucault does not distinguish clearly problematization as an object of inquiry from problematization as a way of inquiry. Problematization as a specific form of critical analysis is a form of “re-problematization”.

Problematization is the core of his “history of thought” which stands in sharp contrast to "history of ideas" ("the analysis of attitudes and types of action") as well as "history of mentalities" ("the analysis of systems of representation"). The history of thought refers to an inquiry of what it is, in a given society and epoch, “what allows one to take a step back from his way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and question it as to its meaning, its conditions and its goals”. Therefore, thought is described as a form of self-detachment from one's own action that allows “to present it to oneself as an object of thought [and] to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals". Thought is the reflection of one's own action “as a problem”. According to Foucault, the notions of thought and problematization are closely linked: to problematize is to engage in “work of thought”. Crucially, then, Foucault implies that our way of reflecting upon ourselves as individuals, as political bodies, as scientific disciplines or other, has a history and, consequently, imposes specific (rather than universal or a priori) structures upon thought.