Psychoanalysis and hermeneutics
pp. 99-107
in: Leendert Mos (ed), Annals of theoretical psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1986Abstract
Psychoanalysis and hermeneutics have recently met in a manner that leaves neither of them untouched. From the standpoint of hermeneutics, psychoanalysis cannot be considered as a natural science. It must be concerned with language, meanings, and understanding. But this conception of psychoanalysis is possible only if hermeneutics can learn from psychoanalysis. It is particularly important to learn that it may be even more difficult to understand oneself than it is to understand the other and that it may also be that we do not even wish to understand ourselves. Consequently the "holy text" according to Freud is not the one of classical hermeneutics—the Bible—but a text written from within the darkness of ourselves—the dream. Therefore, classical hermeneutics (for instance, that of Schleiermacher and Dilthey) must be left behind and a hermeneutics that has listened to the lessons of Freud must be formulated. This is the challenge of modern hermeneutics. I will distinguish among three answers to that challenge: The phenomenological hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur (1965), the critical hermeneutics of Jürgen Habermas (1968), and the semiotical hermeneutics of Jacques Lacan (1966).
