Ricoeur's Critical Hermeneutics and the Psychotherapeutic Model of Critical Theory

Abstract

This paper was presented at an international conference entitled, After Ricoeur: An Interdisciplinary Conference, in Oklahoma City in October, 2006. I contend that Ricoeur's famous mediation of the contest between Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Habermas's critical theory is one of his enduring legacies, but that his intervention can be clarified and extended by separating it from the Freudian context he developed in Freud and Philosophy and embracing postmodern accounts of psychotherapeutic practice.