The influence of Bergson on the reception of psychoanalysis in the scope of french philosophy: the matter of the uncouncious

Abstract

This study develops some considerations on the role of Bergsonism in the reception of the Freudian theory in France. Our objective is to find the extension at which the philosophy of Bergson prepared the French intellectual environment to effectively receive psychoanalysis by influencing the manner of reading Freud in the further phases of the French philosophy: Existentialism and Structuralism. If considering the spiritualist aspect it indeed occurred a theoretical kinship between the metaphysics of virtuality and the Freudian metapsychology, the following phase reveals a radical rejection of the uncouncious hypothesis, as in Sartre's philosophy, f or example (which Georges Politzer had already foreseen). Similar refusal can be understood as a reaction to the Bergsonian metaphysics, the idea of inner life, which will somehow imply the rehabilitation of the uncouncious, no longer thought as a place of inwardness, a psychic instance, but absorbed as language, particularly during a phase of Jacques Lacan's thoughts.