Abstract
Distress, Religion, Faith: Ricoeur Reader of Freud. Daniel Frey mentions the complex theoretical alliance between energetics and hermeneutics in Freud and Philosophy and considers that Freud’s epistemological model includes this alliance. He evokes the Ricoeurian contribution to the theory of the symbol, which can be in its turn a dissimulation or a revelation of the sacred. This observation leads the author to the Freudian critique of religion capable of integrating with a faith. It appears then that Ricoeur arrives at the Freudian critique of religion where it is strongest, namely in the link it manifests between desire and illusion. This gives the author an opportunity to identify a certain number of Ricoeurian preoccupations about the question of religion in Freud and thus to reveal Ricoeur’s Barthian heritage as regards the problematic of a religion without faith. After having gone through Ricoeur’s reflection on the question of religion and faith in Freud, there remains one last question for Daniel Frey: is there, in the affective dynamism of religious belief, something to overcome its own archaism? The answer to this question constitutes the last part of this chapter.