La promesse dans les addictions : De la reconnaissance de soi à la reconnaissance mutuelle selon Hannah Arendt et Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

Promise is necessary to every therapeutic relationships and seems even to be the prerequisite condition. With addict patients, the importance of promise is maybe more evident because reliability of their word is often questioned. This is why in this paper are examined ethical issues of promises from Hannah Arendt' and Paul Ricoeur's works. For these authors, promise is paired first with memory to construct an almost similar dialectic to that between identity and otherness and secondly with pardon to allow action to continue face to the irreversibility of past and unpredictability of future. Promise allows the road from self-recognition to mutual recognition to be opened. But to promise too much is dangerous. Promise can proclaim the glory of ipseity by allowing an identity withdrawal. Risk is also institutional and politic, the temptation to remove all unpredictability can construct a totalitarian system.