Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005)

2. Psychoanalysis and structuralism

In 1957 Ricoeur was elected Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne where he remained until 1966, when he was appointed Dean at the University Paris X, Nanterre – a position he currently holds in conjunction with Professorships in the Department of Philosophy and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the intellectual climate in Paris was changing in significant ways: there was a growing interest in psychoanalysis, and structuralist ideas were beginning to have a significant impact. Ricoeur responded to this change by undertaking a detailed inquiry into the work of Freud and by engaging critically with some of the key texts underpinning the structuralist approach (see Psychoanalysis, methodological issues in; Structuralism).

Freud and Philosophy appeared in 1965 and is one of Ricoeur’s best-known works. Ricoeur provides a thorough analysis of the development of Freud’s work, with the aim of bringing out its philosophical relevance. Unlike philosophical orientations (like phenomenology) which take the contents of consciousness as a starting point, Freud begins by questioning the primacy of consciousness and looking elsewhere, at the level of the unconscious, for the key processes that shape psychic life. But, as Ricoeur shows, Freud’s postulation of unconscious processes is inseparable from the activity of interpretation. Psychoanalysis is, on Ricoeur’s account, a form of hermeneutics in which the analyst employs a specialized set of rules, assumptions and models in order to make sense of actions and utterances that are initially difficult to understand. Hence psychoanalysis should be regarded, not as a natural science like physics or chemistry, but rather as an interpretative discipline similar in character to history and literary criticism; it is a discipline concerned with deciphering symbols and signs in relation to the expression of desire.

Ricoeur’s critical discussions of structuralism appeared in a series of essays which were brought together in a volume entitled The Conflict of Interpretations (1969). There were many thinkers in France and elsewhere who argued that the principles of structural linguistics – especially as elaborated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure – provided a generalizable model that could be used for the analysis of social and cultural phenomena (see Structuralism in linguistics). Ricoeur had serious reservations about this line of argument. He wanted to show that, while structuralist methods of analysis could be useful for certain purposes, they were based on a number of assumptions which limited their validity. Hence structuralist methods could not provide a comprehensive and self-sufficient approach; they had to be integrated into a broader hermeneutical theory (see Hermeneutics).

Ricoeur developed this argument through a rigorous analysis of the work of some of the authors who were influential in the rise of structuralism. This included the work of structural linguists, such as Saussure, Jakobson and Hjelmslev, as well as the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-strauss – one of the few thinkers who explicitly and consistently described himself as a structuralist. Through a brilliant analysis of Lévi-Strauss’s writings on myth, Ricoeur showed that Lévi-Strauss was constantly overstepping the limits of validity of the structuralist approach, ending up in what Ricoeur described as ‘a Kantianism without a transcendental subject’. Ricoeur also argued that the structuralist analysis of myth was at best a partial account, since it neglected, among other things, the ways in which myths were embedded in historical traditions that were handed down from one generation to the next.