Freud and Philosophy  

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

Summary

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."

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.

Excerpt on "masters of suspicion"

"These three masters of suspicion [Marx, Nietzsche and Freud] are not to be misunderstood, however, as three masters of skepticism. They are, assuredly, three great “destroyers.” But that of itself should not mislead us; destruction, Heidegger says in Sein und Zeit, is a moment of every new foundation, including the destruction of religion, insofar as religion is, in Nietzsche’s phrase, a “Platonism for the people.” It is beyond destruction that the question is posed as to what thought, reason, and even faith still signify. All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth."

Scholarly reception

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. 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."

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.

Adolf Grünbaum, in The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), has criticized Ricœur's hermeneutic interpretation of Freud. Grünbaum denounces Ricœur's attempt to limit the proper subject of psychoanalysis to the verbal communications of the patient in analysis as "ideological surgery" and "mutilation" of psychoanalysis. Grünbaum argues that Freud could not have accepted such a limited conception of the proper domain of psychoanalysis, since he often considered the nonverbal behavior of patients, speculated about the psychological meaning of artifacts such as statues and paintings, and most importantly believed that his discoveries held true for people who had never been analyzed and therefore never had to produce a narrative account of their symptoms.

See also

• Suspicion

Books

• The Oxford Companion to Philosophy

People

• Christopher Norris