Ricoeur and his application of psychology to the collective

Abstract

This article aims to explain how Ricoeur translates Freudian metapsychology from the individual to the collective, given that the Ricoeurian vindication of the libidinal economy instinct is obstacle in this translation. Our hypothesis is that this conversion will be possible through two intermediate steps. The first is to have gathered psychoanalysis and history under the larger genus of otherness, as flesh, while In Oneself as Another they were treated within the large genus of otherness but as consciousness and as other, respectively. The second step is to give a transcendental twist to his research, which will lead him to ask for the structures of collective existence that make the application of psychoanalytic categories possible, instead of wondering about how to perform this translation. Within this turn Ricoeur reduces psychoanalytic categories to the phenomenology of the capable human, and from that anthropology to a temporal ontology.

Keywords: libidinal economy, flesh, temporality.