Anthropology versus philosophy: conceptualization of ideas of psychoanalysis

Abstract

This article offers a critical rethinking of the view on ideas of psychoanalysis that have been established in Russian philosophical texts. The need to consider psychoanalytic concepts in the history of philosophy of the twentieth century, as well as in other educational courses, led to the creation of an unsubstantiated theoretical construct – «the philosophy of psychoanalysis». Against the backdrop of a number of problems of this type of conceptualization, we propose to concretize the area of interaction between philosophy and psychoanalysis to a series of anthropological questions that have consequences for cultural, ethical and socio-philosophical issues, but in a revised form that does not have a direct connection with the theory and practice of contemporary psychoanalysis. Such a clarification, as shown in the article, allows us to more adequately and correctly (without the inaccuracies of a superficial and philosophically biased translation) present the originality of psychoanalytic ideas. This approach confronts us with the question of how exactly contemporary psychoanalytic thought can be used as a methodology in philosophical and anthropological research.