On Recognition and Nonrecognition: Paul Ricoeur, Mutual Recognition and the Intersubjectivists

Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Chief Psychiatrist, Supervisor of Psychotherapy, and Teaching Faculty at The William Allanson White Institute.

Email: docjhsacks@gmail.com

The Course of Recognition is one of the last major works from Paul Ricoeur, a major thinker and philosopher of the twentieth century. In it, he moved his theory of dialectical phenomenological hermeneutics into the intersubjective relational world of psychoanalysis. His model of philosophical anthropology encounters the domains of self, identity, narrative-identity, other, and self recognition, as well as mutual recognition. Ricoeur argues that each of these themes are superimposed on each other and applied to the dissymmetry of any human relationship, the so called “abyss.”

This talk will attempt to clarify and summarize the essence of Paul Ricoeur’s thinking- his fifty-year opus. These texts weave the two domains of philosophical anthropology and psychoanalytic thinking; culminating in contemporary concepts that are of interest and importance to the psychoanalytic community today.  These two worlds overlap in language, tone, praxis, and content: mutual recognition. Ironically, these worlds appear to have not yet mutually recognized each other. These acts of nonrecognition will be clarified, and the domains of mutual recognition will be articulated.

Ricoeurs' blending of philosophical anthropology and psychoanalytic thinking serves as an ideal pedagogical model for teaching psychoanalytic principles from a philosophical vantage point especially as they appear to arrive at overlapping constructs in this case mutual recognition.  After all, pedagogue was originally among the ancient Greeks a slave who attended the children of his master and on their way to school often acted as a tutor.  Psychoanalysis deserves this ancient tradition and Paul Ricoeur takes us on the journey from ancient times to contemporary psychoanalytic principles.

Ricoeur’s concepts of poetic semantic imagination, belonging, tradition, ideology and utopia will be introduced and explored within the contemporary clinical concepts of the third (way) co-constructionism, dissociation and creative space.

My goal is to summarize Ricoeur’s work leading to The Course of Recognition, and to point out uncanny similarities in works of major relational/intersubjective psychoanalytic leaders in the field today (Bromberg, Stern and Levenson, Benjamin.)

I suggest that this blending of disciplines serves as an ideal pedagogical model for psychoanalytic teaching for beginning as well as advanced students.