According to Michel Foucault, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud shape our thought in the second half of the twentieth century. We will first outline their philosophy in order to recognize a number of new concepts they have formulated such as materialism, alienation, instinct, impulse,unconscious, ego, the eternal return, and the will to power. Then we will focus on the influence of psychoanalysis on the preoccupation with the self and the subject, addressing the question ”to what extent the modern subject can free himself from the original trauma of the being in the world?” In order to answer it, we will focus on the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan and Emanuel Levinas, who formulate what we now know as "the philosophy of the other”, which may be considered as a new answer to the classic question of the traumatic state of human being. According to Sartre, with whom the postmodern philosophers of the philosophy of Paris (philosophers who grew up in Paris after the war in the 60's and 70's of the 20th century) disagree, only the self-deception of man allows him to make the existential situation tolerable. In contrast to Sartre, the young philosophers of Phenomenology and Existentialism,  such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, and others, change the conditions for understanding the relationship between man and himself and with his immediate environment comprising of language, society, politics, communication and history. Their thought is called “post-structuralist” or “postmodernist” philosophy will be discussed later in this course.

Post-structuralist thought develops as an anti-Freudian and anti-Marxist thought, in Foucault, Derrida, and especially in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who in their first book written together [Anti-Oedipus, Paris, 1972) marked the beginning of the revolution. Philosophy and psychoanalysis after the “Death of the Subject," a philosophy that does not recognize the Enlightenment and humanism as a sacred leading principle, as a revolution in human sciences and understanding of mind and thought, which serves as the basis for all subsequent thought untill now.