Ricoeur's Contribution to Psychoanalysis: A Critique of His Critics

The scientific status of psychoanalysis has long been the subject of considerable dispute. In order to defend the status of psychoanalysis as a science in its own right, it has been argued that psychoanalysis is a natural science like any other. From this position however, one is quickly forced to dismiss the differences between psychoanalysis and the natural sciences as ambiguities in need of clarification or signs of scientific weakness and immaturity on the part of psychoanalysis. On the other hand, it has been insisted that psychoanalysis should be regarded as a purely hermeneutic enterprise. As such, psychoanalysis would deal with meanings and motives, make use of the “method” of identification or re-enactment (rather than empirical verification) in order to understand types of actions. From this position, however, one is forced to repudiate all causal claims made by psychoanalysis as inappropriate to the field of study.

If one looks to the Freudian opus to adjudicate in a debate over whether psychoanalysis is more properly regarded as a natural science or a hermeneutic enterprise, one finds no adequate verdict. Freud often speaks in hermeneutic terms of interpretations of meanings, motives, phantasies, ideas and instinctual representatives. And Freud often speaks in natural scientific terms of causal explanations, cathexes, displacements, quotas of affect and instinctual aims. Thus, in regard to dreams he states “the dream content seems like a transcript of the dream thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation” (1900, 277). However, in regard to dreams he also states “Dreaming has taken on the task of bringing back under control of the preconscious the excitation in the Ucs. which has been left free; in so doing, it discharges the Ucs. excitation, serves it as a safety valve …” (1900, 579).