La toute-puissance : entre mythe et raison

• Main Author: Jacquy Chemouni
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Presses universitaires de Caen 2006-12-01
• Series: Kentron
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/kentron/1766

The author suggests studying the relations between reason and affect in the Freudian conception of the myth. Like Lévy-Bruhl who makes confusion between reason and affect by attributing a prelogical thought to the primitives, Freud, from different premises, also establishes an objectively unfounded distinction between the primitives’ mode of functioning which is emotional and that of the civilized people. If these errors result partially from an ethnocentristic vision of the primitive world, they are mainly based on a theoretical presupposition which consists in maintaining a sharp dichotomy between reason and affect and in believing that the reason operates independently of the world of the feelings or that the latter expresses itself outside any rationality.