The hermeneutic versus the scientific conception of psychoanalysis
an unsuccessful effort to chart a via media for the human sciences
pp. 219-239
in: Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert, Ernest Mathijs (eds), Einstein meets Magritte: an interdisciplinary reflection, Berlin, Springer, 1999Abstract
According to the so-called "hermeneutic" reconstruction of classical psychoanalytic theory, the received scientific conception of the Freudian enterprise gave much too little explanatory weight to so-called "meaning" connections between unconscious motives, on the one hand, and overt symptoms on the other. Thus in a paper on schizophrenia, the German philosopher and professional psychiatrist Karl Jaspers [8, p. 91] wrote: "In Freud's work we are dealing in fact with [a] psychology of meaning, not causal explanation as Freud himself thinks." The father of psychoanalysis, we are told, fell into a "confusion of meaning connections with causal connections."
