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Paul Ricoeur is hailed as possibly the most influential of the New Freudians who emerged in France in the late 1950s to recast our reading of psychoanalysis and,
specifically, to provide a fresh perspective by way of hermeneutics on Freud's seminal texts. Ricoeur will perhaps prove to be a more profound influence on our understanding of Freud in the new millennium than even Lacan, whose repeated stabs a brule pourpoint at American ego psychology inflicted superficial wounds. His work is hardly less difficult than Lacan's, but there is much to be gained by the tenacious and linguistically aware reader, as his considerable impact on the whole area of the humanities, not just textual analysis, psychoanalysis and the phenomenologies of Husserl and Jaspers, attests.
This new book is grounded strongly in the series of talks which constituted the Gifford Lectures ‘On Selfhood: The Question of Personal Identity’ which Ricoeur gave in 1986 at the University of Edinburgh. It also emerges from, and refers back to, his major three-volume Time and Narrative and, while we are provided with a gloss on this along the way, Ricoeur does assume familiarity with his earlier writings. The reader had better also approach Oneself as Another with a reasonable understanding of psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and phenomenology and the relationship between all three, in particular Ricoeur's tracing of the interplay between Freud's ‘energetics’ and his ‘hermeneutics’, that is to say, ‘between his neurobiological, quasi-physical metapsychology of drive and energy and his psychological, quasi-linguistic interpretation of dreams and symptoms’. It should be clear by now that this can in no sense be considered an introductory text.
Nevertheless it does provide the most accessible outline of his ‘philosophical ethics’ available and, taking as its focus the concept of personal identity, develops a hermeneutics of the self to arrive, eventually, at an epistemological place ‘situated beyond the alternativ