You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The attempt by philosophers to explain and evaluate Freud may seem both puzzling and inappropriate. Indeed, such was the underlying theme of an extended review of Ricoeur's book, De L'interpretation: Essai sur Freud (1965) by Michel Tort (1966) which appeared in Les Temps modernes. I shall not propose a general defense of philosophical exegesis, but offer instead four comments I feel are relevant to this issue:
(1) Any serious attempt to come to terms with a major new theory and to try to fit oneself and one's culture around it is appropriate.
(2) In the absence of external feedback, the language and conceptualization of a discipline grow increasingly arcane and splintered. This point applies to analysts too, for whom the temptations to a posture of omniscience and insularity are powerful.
(3) Ricoeur's own philosophy is worked out in his long dialogue with Freud, and this hermeneutic approach to some disciplines is worthy of consideration on its own merits.
(4) Ricoeur “worked through” some perturbations of his own feelings in the course of preparing and writing this book. Indeed, it has often crossed my mind that his “meeting” with Freud came to have the quality of a pseudotransference.
In this paper I shall try to isolate, to analyze, and then to bring back together several strands in the meeting of the philosopher and the doctor. My premise is that the explanation of Freud in the language of epistemology can be helpful and illuminating. To this end I shall draw attention to the use Ricoeur makes of Immanuel Kant and shall try to show in some detail how Kantian some of Freud's thought was. Ultimately, though, the encounter between philosopher and doctor was marred, because Ricoeur has been able to meet Freud only conditionally. The condition is that Freud