Paul Ricoeur’s Essay on Interpretation and Freud's Negation

Sigmund Freud, one of the world’s most renowned psychoanalysts, is well-known for his study of the unconscious. In his essay on negation, Freud extrapolates on the idea of revealing truth from the unconscious through denial, negation, and repression.

One of the main ideas behind Freud’s Negation is the revelation of truth through one’s negation or denial. Freud provides us with a few salient examples, but the one most indicative of Freud’s argument, in my opinion, is that of the patient who denies dreaming about his mother. Freud explains,

‘You ask who this person in the dream can be. It is not my mother’. We emend this to: ‘So it is his mother’. In our interpretation, we take the liberty of disregarding the negation and of picking out the subject-matter alone of the association. It is as though the patient had said: ‘It’s true that my mother came into my mind as I thought of this person, but I don’t feel inclined to let the association count’. (22)

Freud argues, by denying that the figure in his dream was in fact his mother, the patient subconsciously confirms that the woman in his dream was his mother.

Philosopher Paul Ricoeur elaborates on this idea in his essay, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Ricoeur explains that the negation in the aforementioned example “does not actually belong to the association that has just come into consciousness; it is rather a condition on which the repressed idea may make its way into the consciousness” (315). Ricoeur extrapolates that negation or denial in this sense is merely a revelation of the truth that was repressed within the unconscious. He continues by saying that Freud could argue that “There is no stronger evidence that we have been successful in our effort to uncover the unconscious than when the patient reacts to it with the words ‘I didn’t think that,’ or ‘I didn’t (ever) think of that’” (315). The mere utterance of the word “no,” or any other similar, negative word, automatically associates...