Nothing to It: Reading Freud as a Philosopher

The special role of psychoanalysis in the development of phenomenology.

The confrontation between philosophy and psychoanalysis has had its heyday. After the major debates between Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Henry, this dialogue now seems to have broken down. It has therefore proven necessary and gainful to revisit these debates to explore their re-usability and the degree to which they can provide new insights from a contemporary point of view.

It can be said that contemporary philosophy suffers from an ‘excess of meaning’, and this is exactly where psychoanalysis comes in and may raise key questions. This is precisely what a philosophical reading of Freud demonstrates. To say ‘Nothing to It’ indicates that the ‘It’—or Freudian Id—is not visible as it never shows itself as a ‘phenomenon’. Such a reading of Freud exemplifies how psychoanalysis has a special role to play in phenomenology's development.