Customer Reviews

Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (The Terry Lectures Series)

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Apparently this book has been either forgotten or ignored. I can think of three reasons why it has languished in obscurity, since the publication of its English translation in 1970: 1. It is over 500 pages long; 2. It is incredibly dense; 3. It addresses a very specific and, some would say, out-moded subject--namely, the fundamentals of Freudian theory. If you are not really interested in Freud, you will not benefit from Ricoeur's exhaustive and painstaking analysis. Even analysts may be turned off by this work, as it is truly a "philosophical" interpretation of Freud's work. The ideal reader of this book, as far as I can tell, then, is someone like me. If, like me, you have read and loved the work of Lacan, you will find Ricoeur's take on Freud very helpful and informative. Ricoeur basically takes the Lacanian interpretation of Freud, including the focus on language and the critique of ego psychology and clarifies it. What is really strange about this is that Lacan's name is, for the most part, consigned to a few footnotes. (He is explicitly mentioned once in the text proper and there are a number of sly allusions to his ideas.) I don't know why Ricoeur is so careful to exclude the main source of his argument. The omission borders on plagiarism. If you read the 17th seminar, you will notice that Lacan makes a wry allusion to Ricoeur when he talks about naming your sources. Leaving this question aside, Ricoeur's book on Freud reads like a clear and capable exposition of Lacan. Ricoeur begins by outlining two kinds of hermeneutic methods, one demystifying (analytic/regressive), the other revelatory (synthetic/progressive). Freud, according to Ricoeur, falls into the first camp. However, Ricoeur promises to complicate this facile classification. The first part of the book places Freud's hermeneutic method in context. Ricouer compares him to the great demystifiers: Nietzsche and Marx. The second part, the "analytic," demonstrates that Freudian method centers around the interpretation of signifiers. The Freudian corpus is examined at length. Ricoeur's careful and methodical exposition here is impressive. He essentially demonstrates that Freud works backwards,always pointing to the lost origin as the site of truth. The really interesting tension of Freudian theory, Ricoeur argues, lies in the conjunction of energetics and hermeneutics. Clearly following Lacan, Ricoeur claims that terms such as condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy) reveal the mixture of these two discourses. In the third section, Ricoeur completes his reading of Freud by demonstrating the implicit or tacit progressive dimension of his work. Essentially, Freud and Hegel are brought together (again, a truly Lacanian maneuver) to elaborate a full account of interpretation or the "symbol." Even though Freud always works backwards to reveal the regressive aspect of all human behavior, there is, according to Ricoeur, a kind of silent, progressive/Hegelian/dialectic narrative operating in his work as well. As I said at the start of this review, this book is long and exhaustive. One sometimes gets the sense that Ricoeur is relating everything he knows about Freud, which admittedly is a lot. There is much that appears unnecessary, but by the end, if you remain patient, you find that Ricoeur has had a clear purpose in mind. Ricoeur gives a plausible defense of the Lacanian intepretation of Freud, over and against the Freud of the ego psychologists. Freud is placed in the context of the great philosophers: Kant, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Hegel, etc. And finally, Freud is revealed as an original and radical theorist of the "symbol."

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