Philosophy Today

Volume 67, Issue 3, Summer 2023

Special Topic: Hermann Levin Goldschmidt’s Contradiction Set Free

Overdetermination, Ambivalence, Contradiction

This paper employs a psychoanalytic framework of the concept of contradiction to engage the methodological self-assuredness in which the philosophical concept of contradiction, as developed by Goldschmidt, is mapped onto a historical framework. Through readings of passages by both Freud and Goldschmidt it questions if, unlike the concept of contradiction found within Western metaphysics, “psychoanalytic contradiction” retains a capacity to call into account its own conceptual articulation.