Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation

Introduction

The book grew out of lectures Ricœur gave at Yale in 1961 and in Louvain in 1962; it appeared in Paris in 1965. It is divided into three books: a “problematic” situating psychoanalysis among theories of interpretation, an “analytic” reading Freud’s work in sequence, and a “dialectic” offering a philosophical interpretation. Ricœur calls Marx, Nietzsche and Freud the “masters of suspicion”, who taught us to read consciousness as a mask, and confronts their unmasking with an interpretation that seeks to recover meaning. Freud’s archaeology of the subject is set against the teleology of spirit in Hegel. Lacan’s circle received the book with hostility; it shaped Ricœur’s later hermeneutics.

Connections

Builds on

• The Interpretation of Dreams1900 · Sigmund Freud

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