Freud and Philosophy

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Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation

The 1970 Yale University Press edition
Author Paul Ricœur
Original title De l'interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud
Translator Denis Savage
Country France
Language French
Subject Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
Published
  • 1965 (Le Seuil, in French)
  • 1970 (Yale University Press, in English)
Media type Print
Pages 573
ISBN ISBN 0-300-02189-5 (Yale edition)

Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (French: De l'interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud) is a 1965 book about Sigmund Freud by Paul Ricœur.

Outline

Ricœur argues that psychoanalysis is not a science but a language, a "semantics of desire." He seeks to bring Freud's ideas into conformity with the linguistic turn - the "effort to understand virtually all aspects of human behavior in terms of language."[1]

For Ricœur, all interpretation partakes of a double hermeneutic. Psychoanalysis involves an "archaeology" of meanings, motives and desires, an attempt to delve into the unconscious layers of repressed or sublimated memory. Yet it also points a way through and beyond that condition by offering the patient renewed possibilities of self-knowledge and creative fulfillment.[2]

Influence

Ricœur's work has been grouped with Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955), Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959), Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), and Jürgen Habermas's Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), books which jointly placed Sigmund Freud at the center of moral and philosophical inquiry.[3] Freud and Philosophy has been called the locus classicus of the "portrait of Freud as a hermeneutician and philosopher - a figure on the model not of Darwin but of Nietzsche", which has "dominated the largely literary and philosophical representations of Freud in recent scholarship."[4]

Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel sees Freud and Philosophy as an important demonstration that Freud was a post-Hegelian thinker, though he notes that Freud himself would have rejected any association with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.[5]

See also

Books
People

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Robinson 1993. p. 195.
  2. ↑ Norris 2005. p. 818.
  3. ↑ Abramson 1986. p. ix.
  4. ↑ Robinson 1993. p. 73.
  5. ↑ Kovel 1991. pp. 5, 240.

Bibliography

Books
  • Abramson, Jeffrey B. (1986). Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought of Freud. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-2913-0. 
  • Kovel, Joel (1991). History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-2916-5. 
  • Norris, Christopher (2005). Honderich, Ted, ed. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-926479-1. 
  • Robinson, Paul (1993). Freud and His Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-08029-7. 
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