The current course will focus on the relationship between psychoanalysis and French philosophy in the second half of the 20th century, philosophy known as “postmodern”. We will first outline Freud’s philosophy in order to recognize a number of new concepts they he has formulated - alienation, instinct, impulse and unconsciousness, the ego, and so on. Later on, we will focus on the influence of psychoanalysis on the preoccupation with the self and the subject, concerning the question, "To what extent the modern subject can free himself from the original trauma of the being (himself) in the world?”.

After we will learn how to use the basic philosophy of Freud, we will emphasizing the relationship [not in practice], with existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, who dealt with questions of truth in relation to the subject and his self-understanding.  In order to see how deep the influence of the Freudian thinking and vocabulary goes, we will focus on the philosophy of Jacques Lacan and Emanuel Levinas, who formulate what we now know as "the philosophy of the other”, which might give a new answer to the classic question of the traumatic state of human being. According to Sartre, with whom the postmodern philosophers argue, in the philosophy of Paris [philosophers who grew up in Paris after the war in the 50/60's and 70's of the 20th century], only the self-deception of man allows him to make the existential situation tolerable. In contrast to Sartre, Phenomenology and Existentialism, the young philosophers – such as Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, and others, have changed the conditions for understanding the relationship between man and himself, and man with his immediate environment - language, society, politics, communication and history. Their thought which is now call “post-structuralist” or “postmodernist”, will be discussed later in this course.

Thus, post-structuralist thought develops as an anti-Freudian and anti-Marxist thought, in Lacan, 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 against the nineteen century modern thinking of the subject: philosophy and psychoanalysis after  the “Death of the Subject," a philosophy that does not recognize enlightenment and humanism as a sacred leading principle, a revolution in human sciences and understanding of mind and thought, which will serve as the basis for all subsequent thought till now.