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Sigmund Freud wrote in a letter to Fliess, '… I secretly nurse the hope of arriving by the same route (i.e., medicine) at my original objective, philosophy. For that was my original ambition before I knew what I was intended to do in the world.'1 Yet freudians have attacked and disclaimed philosophy, and philosophers have challenged the scientific basis for psychoanalysis. What are the complex interrelationships between these two overlapping fields? Does freudianism contain an implicit philosophical point of view far more complex than the limited psychic determinism, in spite of Freud's disclaimer of a psychoanalytic Weltanschauung?
Paul Ricoeur, a French religious philosopher who has not been analyzed nor practiced analysis, has written an important book, a stimulating tour de force that allows us to envisage both the psychoanalytic body of knowledge and the psychoanalytic movement in a broad perspective within the framework of its links to culture, history, and the evolution of Western intellectual thought. In the course of his book, he makes many observations on what he believes comprises the psychoanalytic ethic and philosophy.
The author is clearly not a narrow polemicist. In keeping with an ancient philosophical tradition, he challenges Freud to a textual, epistemological debate, only occasionally straying from the content of psychoanalysis as elaborated in Freud's complete works. Ricoeur respects the brilliance and innovativeness of his antagonist, and the debate forms an intriguing dialectical discourse