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The 1960s in France were certainly the years of the structuralist turn, rather than the hermeneutic. Ricoeur was among the few French philosophers to immediately accept Gadamer's revolutionary lesson of Wahrheit und Methode, published in Germany in 1960, which was partially translated into French only in the mid-1970s. In 1958, Levi-Strauss published his Anthropologie structurale in France, and, in 1962, La Pensée Sauvage. With these works, the structuralist point of view, which began in linguistics with Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale (1916), largely and rapidly diffused into anthropology and other disciplines. Although Louis Althusser, another French protagonist of those years, applied structuralism to Marxism, it was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan who tried to re-interpret Freud's doctrine and therapeutic methods by conceiving of the unconscious as having a fundamentally linguistic structure. Thus, in France, this movement swiftly became a new cultural paradigm and a methodological trend in the sciences.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-39010-9_6

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