Freud's dreams of reason: the Kantian structure of psychoanalysis

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2020

upon the implicit epistemological position in Klein and Winnicott, and the more explicit one advanced by Bion. Finally, we explore the psychoanalytic attitude towards the possibility of knowledge.

2012

In this paper I sketch a reconstruction of the basic psychoanalytic conception of the mind in terms of two historical resources: the conception of the subject developed in post-Kantian idealism, and Spinoza's laws of the affects in Part Three of the Ethics. The former, I suggest, supplies the conceptual basis for the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, problem, however, is that psychoanalysis is not consistently Kantian, either, and that its ambiguity cannot be resolved in either the one direction or the other. This should not, I have urged, be made an objection to psychoanalysis. But if correct, it means that psychoanalysis does not offer a philosophically safe home for Kant's 'I ought' to the extent that Longuenesse supposes.

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2003

De Gruyter eBooks, 2022

In examining what he calls "aF reudian hermeneutics of suspicion," Adam Graves explains thatR icoeur uses Freud'sw ork to underminec ertain aspects of Kant'sp ractical philosophy. Ricoeur claims that practical reason-contrary to what Kant proposes-is not pure and ap riori, but has its roots in our human desires.H owever,a ccordingt oG raves, Ricoeur'sF reudian critique of Kant misses its mark since Kantian ethics (and the normativity that underpins it) alreadya ddresses similar suspicions about practical reason. Accordingt o Graves, it is then possibletobase the mediation between desire and normativity on ab road conception of action in Kant. 1I ntroduction In order to understand Ricoeur'si nitial encounter with Freud in the 1960s, one has to bear in mind his principal philosophicalc ommitments at thatt ime. The first of these commitments arose as am ethodological consequenceo fR icoeur's phenomenologyoft he will. It involved an increasingi nterest in problems of semantics and, more specifically, in the meaning of symbols which, on account of their particularform of overdetermination, cry out for hermeneutical reflection.¹ The second commitment arose out of his longstanding preoccupation with Jean Nabert'sr eflexive philosophy, and especiallyN abert'ss o-called "ethics of affirmation," which concerned the "appropriation of our effort to exist and of our desire to be,through works which bear witness to that effort and desire."² Ricoeur first encountered Freud standing on the corner wheret hese two rather idiosyncratic commitments happened to intersect.For Freud'swork appeared to entail a so-called "semantics of desire" aimed at deciphering the complex relationship between symbolic representation and libido,b etween meaning and the desire to be, or between hermeneutics and reflexivep hilosophy.³ Thus, while Ricoeur's detour through the thicket of psychoanalytic theory might have seemed like

2017

For more than a hundred years now, the dominant view amongst scholars has been that Kant's philosophy has nothing to do with psychology, or, at the very least, that psychology is inessential to Kant's philosophical project. In the early reception of Kant's work, however, psychology played a central role. Philosophers such as Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, Jakob Friedrich Fries, and Friedrich Eduard Beneke all maintained that Kant's philosophy could only be justified on the basis of a psychological account of cognition. This doctoral thesis shows that this tradition should be interpreted as a reasonable response to the problems that these early Kantians encountered in Kant's philosophy and that, though it is now mostly forgotten, this tradition formed an important part of the philosophical landscape in Germany around 1800.

In: Bollettino di Studi Sartriani, 9, 2013, pp. 53-76. For psychoanalysts, for researchers outside the psychoanalytic realm, as well as for laymen, the most lasting part of Freud's work has been his view concerning the role of the unconscious in human life. However, there is deep confusion about its actual status. A significant reductionist emphasis pervades the scientific atmosphere of post-Freudian times. Consequently, present-day researchers outside of the psychoanalytic community claim that if the Freudian unconscious is anything, it is only the brain, and phenomena psychoanalysts study could also be explained by referring to the 'cognitive', 'the new' or 'adaptive' unconscious 1 . This trend contradicts the classical psychoanalytic view. Benjamin B. Rubinstein and Arnold H. Modell are among the rare psychoanalysts who have treated the reductionist challenge in a detailed manner 2 . Freud gave his followers reason to think that the unconscious was som...

Giving an outline of Freud and Psychoanalysis to undergraduate students

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2007

This paper engages Freud's relation to Kant, with specific reference to each theorist's articulation of the interconnections between ethics and religion. I argue that there is in fact a constructive approach to ethics and religion in Freud's thought, and that this approach can be better understood by examining it in relation to Kant's formulations on these topics. Freud's thinking about religion and ethics participates in the Enlightenment heritage, with its emphasis on autonomy and rationality, of which Kant's model of practical reason is in many ways exemplary. At the same time, Freud advances Kantian thinking in certain important respects; his work offers a more somatically, socially, and historically grounded approach to the formation of rational and ethical capacities, and hence makes it more compatible with contemporary concerns and orientations that eschew the pitfalls of ahistorical idealist orientations.

Kantian Yearbook, 2014

In his pre-critical lectures on rational psychology, Kant employs an argument from the I to the transcendental freedom of the soul. In the (A-edition of the) first Critique, he distances himself from rational psychology, and instead offers four paralogisms of this doctrine, insisting that ‘I think’ no longer licenses any inferences about a soul. Kant also comes alive to the possibility that we could be thinking mechanisms - rational beings, but not agents. These developments rob him of his pre-critical rationalist argument for freedom. In the Groundwork, this is a serious problem; if we are not free, morality will be a phantasm for us. In Groundwork III, Kant attempts to overcome this by offering a new argument for our freedom, involving the standpoint of practical reason. In this paper, I detail these developments and present a practical and phenomenological reading of Kant’s approach in Groundwork III. I also venture a defence of this new argument.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2012