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CHAPTER ONE: BIOGRAPHIES OF RICOEUR
Introduction
In reading the work of Paul Ricoeur, I have come to understand narratives as
interpretative actions that trace the shadow of our elusive desires and generate
understandings of our existence in the world. Dispossessed of the certainty of meaning
and willing to consider that things may not be as they seem, my thesis is that a
hermeneutics reflects a way of being in the world that is necessarily involved in every
instance of meaning. In this dissertation I take up the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur to
inquire into psychotherapy as a meaningful practice and to explore how the structure of
narrative interpolates our reflections to amplify the meaning of human life.
In the first chapter of this dissertation I outline some of the significant events of
Ricoeur’s life. A biography is provided to elucidate the world and events out of which
Paul Ricoeur’s ideas developed. After highlighting several important life experiences, a
preliminary sounding of Ricoeur’s ideas follows. In an intellectual biography Ricoeur’s
ideas are presented chronologically, beginning with the voluntary and involuntary
dialectic of human desire, leading to his early work on the multivocal nature of symbols,
and finally extending into philosophy of language. Next, taking up Ricoeur’s reading of
Freud and psychoanalysis we see how the teleological and archaeological aspects of
understanding become an ontology1. It is by virtue of narration which orders experience
while experience also seeks to be ordered in narrative that Being and time become
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intermingled. In the second chapter I elaborate on Ricoeur’s reading of the history of
modern hermeneutics. I take up his understanding of his place within this history and in
the process his own theory of hermeneutics unfolds. By analyzing the moments of
understanding that seem to make up the hermeneutic circle it becomes apparent how
explanations of experience can increase our understanding and bring to light new
meanings of life. In the third chapter I examine Ricoeur’s re-interpretation of
psychoanalysis and demonstrate how psychoanalysis can be considered a hermeneutics
that liberates a greater potency of being through a special form of dialogical narration.
The outcome of analysis is unpredictable and determinate effects are variable, but
expressing the experiences of living and reflecting on these expressions can help make
sense of living. Revisiting Ricoeur’s work through exegesis and exposition allows a
consideration of how reflective narrative can generate insight and reform the meaning of
life experience. Placing narrative at the heart of a general interpretation of
psychotherapy, in the fourth chapter I consider what is therapeutic about narrative and
what psychotherapy research can and cannot claim to accomplish. On the basis of a
Ricoeurian hermeneutics I re-examine psychotherapy and its research and argue that
efforts to achieve objectivity and to determine universal truths must be subordinated to
“ontological preoccupations, whereby understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode
of knowing in order to become a way of being and a way of relating to beings and to
being” (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 44).
1
Habermas (1968/1971) explains how the demarcation between Being and time is the foundation
of ontology (p. 301). This separation of Being and time is first documented in the poem of
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A Short Biography of Ricoeur’s Life
To begin with the biography, Charles Reagan (1996) a student of Paul Ricoeur
since 1962 and a long-time personal friend and confidant of Ricoeur portrays Ricoeur as
unflappable, patient, and friendly; a man with a great sense of humour, who taught his
students to always search for the most generous interpretations possible and to give the
utmost respect and credit to those from whom one has learnt. Despite Ricoeur’s
magnanimous and gentle character, his life was not free from conflict. Reagan (1996)
describes Ricoeur’s life as emerging between places of pacifism and activism and says of
Ricoeur that, “He was orphaned by one war, imprisoned during another, and a leader of
the opposition to yet another war” (p. 2). The struggle of his life, however, continually
bore fruit. As we will see, his creativity with conflict is mirrored in the quality of the
dialectic characteristic of Ricoeur’s narrative hermeneutic philosophy.
Born on February 27th, 1913, Paul Ricoeur’s mother died 7 months later, leaving
him and his sister Alice, who was born two years earlier, to live with their father. When
their father, Jules, was called to service in WWI, the children went to live with their
paternal grandparents. Two years later their father was declared missing in action.
Orphaned, Paul and his sister Alice found refuge in the home of their devout Protestant
grandparents and a nearby Aunt. Life consisted of an orderly routine of church going and
Bible study. The children were official orphans of the state and in compensation received
a small yearly stipend from the government to help cover the cost of school expenses.
Parmenides and then again in Plato’s Timaeus. See Plato (1871/1982), p. 1167.
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Consequently, in conjunction with his religious education Ricoeur was able to study
many fine books from an early age.
Because of the German invasion of Poland twenty-six years later in September of
1939, Ricoeur was called to military service as Britain and France declared war on
Germany. Although he believed in the non-interventionism characteristic of France at
that time, he was able to uphold the paradoxical meaning of having to intervene in order
to support the principles if not the actuality of non-interventionism. Ricoeur received the
Croix de Guerre with three palm leaves in honour of his ability as a solider, exemplified
by his having strategically blown up a bridge and German tank. The complexity of
Ricoeur’s identity as a pacifist was most salient when the practicalities of existence
contested his ideological convictions. In his life Ricoeur embraced the imperfect
correspondence of ideology and practice while maintaining coherent but not entirely
uncritical hope for resolution.
From June 7th 1940 to May 9th 1945, Ricoeur became Germany’s prisoner of war.
As a consequence of the German prison guards’ desire to avoid any disruptions in the
camp that might lead to their being sent to the Russian front, prisoners enjoyed many
privileges. Rooms were reassigned according to interests and activities. Along with other
inmates of similar inclination he managed to read many major texts and to familiarize
himself with the German traditions of hermeneutic philosophy and phenomenology. As
Reagan (1996) writes, “Those who wanted to spend their time reading would no longer
have to tolerate those who wanted to play checkers” (p. 9). Consequently, Ricoeur was
put in with several other French intellectuals and they were each permitted to order one
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new book every month. They organized reading lists and shared books with each other
developing course work for other prisoners. The lectures were eventually recognized by
the French academic system and after the war students were given official credit. Thus an
original constraint provided the conditions for creative action. Ricoeur took refuge from
an oppressive situation in a resourcefulness that stretched to creatively embrace the
involuntary position in which he found himself.
During his imprisonment, when the Germans began to lose the Second World
War, Ricoeur again demonstrated his innovative ability to interpolate constraint with
freedom. The imminent arrival of the Russians forced everyone to leave on foot.
Prisoners and guards gathered their belongings and left camp in the middle of the night.
After the 2nd day of a 350 km hike to the next camp, Ricoeur and some fellow prison
mates decided to remain sheltered in a barn. After a warning from the German soldiers
that they would be shot by the SS or captured by the Russians, they were allowed to stay
and face their destiny. After three weeks of avoiding German/Russian crossfire, Germans
again captured them. But unlike their prison mates, who in 5 weeks walked 350 km in the
winter snow, the Germans gave Ricoeur and his troupe several meals and a passenger
train ride to their new camp before they were reunited with their exhausted prison mates.
Around the 22nd of April 1945 the Canadians liberated this camp.
Risk and bravery were counterpart to Ricoeur’s successful transgression of what
seemed given. He tried to live the convictions to which he and his community ascribed
even when it meant risk to his own and his family’s welfare. Not only did he creatively
embrace the involuntary, he also volunteered to create that which was worth embracing.
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In 1957, Ricoeur was living in Paris and working as the Chair of General Philosophy at
the Sorbonne. French policy, at that time, refused independence to the Arab majority in
Algeria. Ricoeur became politically active, writing letters and articles and participating in
demonstrations. Reagan (1996) quotes Ricoeur as saying,
We do not want to be like those German university professors during the Nazi period
who remained silent because they were government employees and because they did
not think it was their job to take outside of the university the principles they honored
within the university. (p. 24)
At this time, Ricoeur was accused of trafficking arms to the Algerian nationalists and
after a short stay in prison his passport was confiscated and he was put under house
arrest. As a publicly identified protester, Ricoeur and his family were at risk of having
their house bombed by ultra right-wing vigilantes.
A decade later, in 1967, Ricoeur decided to leave the prestigious Sorbonne and
along with two other colleagues, he moved to a campus of the University of Paris in the
suburb of Nanterre. There he found that overcrowding, along with few organized student
activities, a lack of professional studies, little career preparation, strict adherence to
national curricula, and standardized examinations created a rigid dulling effect on
students’ education. Ricoeur and his colleagues decided on efforts for a new campus
style university at Nanterre. Ricoeur writes of their “hope that the size of the institution
would allow less anonymous relations between teachers and students, following the
ancient idea of the community of masters and disciples” (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 26). They
embarked on a French educational experiment in the style of the British and American
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residential universities. After one year of teaching, in 1968, students began to protest,
focusing on the divisive presence of the two faculties at the university: The Faculty of
Letters and the Faculty of Law. Those in the Faculty of Law were generally from affluent
families with conservative values. By contrast those in the Faculty of Letters were leftist
and extreme leftist with hopes similar to many students in France at that time of
transforming a bourgeois materialist culture concerned with conventional respectability
and hierarchical structure into an egalitarian paradise. Protests focused on a variety of
authoritarian rules and ceremonial activities. At this time police were not called in at
Nanterre, however, when the protests spread to the Sorbonne a violent clash of police and
students resulted in 600 students and 345 police injured.
In the following year there was further unrest at Nanterre. Leftists migrated to the
suburban campus in hopes of toppling the government by attacking from inside its
institution. Armed with bars and chains they refused to allow opponents, whether they
were students, administrators, or professors to enter various areas of the campus.
Unwilling to accept students dictating to professors where they could and could not go,
Ricoeur made a direct challenge by entering the cafeteria for a coffee. The event ended
with Ricoeur, garbage can on head, humiliated by a student. Reagan (1996) writes of
Ricoeur’s mortification:
Here, a man of peace, a pacifist, a man of reason and argument, a devout believer in
mercy and forgiveness, a man gentle in every way, was the target of a physical
attack. There were two effects of this incident: The public was outraged and Ricoeur
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received great sympathy, even from his philosophical and political opponents. (p.
35)
Ricoeur took a two-week leave of absence and upon his return chaos at Nanterre
had worsened. Many faculty members refused to teach for fear of personal safety.
Security guards who were called in to maintain peace on campus were interned, covered
in black paint, and subjected to a kangaroo court set up by leftist protesters. On February
26th, 1970 Ricoeur agreed to banalize the university meaning that civil police were given
authority to patrol on campus. Reagan points out that sometime before police had been
given authority to patrol at night and Ricoeur only extended authority for patrol during
the day. Regardless of who authorized the banalization the next day, as soon as police
arrived student protests became aggressive. Police cars were stoned, barricades erected,
and police officers assaulted. Over the following days, leftists from all over Paris joined
the fight while bulldozers were brought in to remove the barricades. Tear gas, smashed
windows, demolished cars, police chasing demonstrators with nightsticks, violent
beatings…eventually the National Guard was called to intervene between the protesters
and the police, who by this time “had gone berserk”. The battle ended on March 4 th.
Ricoeur (1995) writes in his autobiography,
I failed in my peacekeeping mission. I attributed my failure less to the detestable
nature of the attacks made against me than to unresolved conflicts within me
between my willingness to listen and my quasi-Hegelian sense of the institution. (p.
26)
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Ricoeur’s vision of an intellectual community peopled with masters and disciples
did not square with students’ ideas of dismantling hierarchy. At Nanterre he was divided
between the sense of equality and social idealism of the students and the importance of
upholding the traditions of the university. Ricoeur understood the university as a rare
place in society entrusted with the invaluable task of questioning socially sanctioned
assumptions, methods, and institutions in accordance with various traditions. Students,
however, had ideas of their own and refused the role of dutiful disciples. Ricoeur, it
seems, missed the message of student protesters and could not recognize their revolt
against the university making wisdom into a hierarchy and institution. He did not,
however, define his failure in terms of unfulfilled expectations, rather he describes
failure as the juncture where creativity breaks down into sterile absolutes, where the pain
of failed expectations incapacitates listening and thereby negates the conditions
necessary for innovative meaning.
Ricoeur officially resigned on March 16th, 1970. His letter of resignation
conveyed deep disappointment with the provocative manner in which police arrived on
campus, with the fact that negotiations, plans and consultations had not occurred before
police had been called in, and with colleagues that had procrastinated and lost faith in
their vision of recreating the Socratic world of university life. Some believed that
Ricoeur had bailed out too soon and argued that if he had held on for a few more weeks
“he would have been seen as the saviour of Nanterre instead of the [Dean] forced to
resign by the leftists” (p. 38). In any case the events prompted a three-year leave of
absence from the French university system during which he began to spend much time in
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America. It was not until the mid 1980’s that Ricoeur re-established his reputation in
French intellectual culture. This time conflict and struggle brought Ricoeur to the new
world and inaugurated a lifelong interest in the complimentarity of analytic and
continental philosophy.
Ricoeur’s life like his work is marked by divisions, dual roles, and the creative
tension of dissimilitude. Although it is not unusual that a conflict may lead to something
new in one’s life, the degree to which limits and conflicts open opportunities for Ricoeur
seems particularly robust. After resigning from Nanterre and spending much time in
America, Ricoeur’s appreciation of the rigor of Anglo-American philosophical argument
refreshed his approach to continental philosophy. He tells us in his intellectual biography
that he found the careful detailed and focused deliberation of analytic philosophy a
refreshing counterpoint to the French “polemic and invective style of argument”
(Ricoeur, 1995, p. 32). Willing to embrace the difference of these traditions, Ricoeur’s
later work mixes styles of exposition and argument by combining “analytic precision
with ontological testimony”.
Sketching Ricoeur’s Intellectual Biography
The traversing of polarities so characteristic of Ricoeur’s personal life is also
prevalent in his intellectual life. Beginning as early as his last year of high school,
Ricoeur remembers having an unsettled mind disturbed by the contrary forces of a strong
faith cultivated by a Protestant upbringing and a critical thinking developed through
training in philosophy. In his later writings, Ricoeur works through the possibility of a
mutual respect and reciprocal completion in matters of conflict, but in the early stages
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when he had just begun to subject his Protestant faith to systematic critique he describes
the experience as “an internecine war, from one armistice to the next, between faith and
reason” (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 6). Throughout his writings Ricoeur is careful not to create an
alliance of philosophy and faith, always bracketing his religious faith from his
philosophical investigations that query faith.
Ihde (1995) points out that of the seminal 20th century hermeneuts, namely
Gadamer, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, Ricoeur’s philosophy is most influenced by traditional
biblical hermeneutics. Although all three have a profound sense of history, for Heidegger
and Gadamer the history of western philosophy predominates whereas for Ricoeur
biblical or religious history is central. There are several features of traditional biblical
hermeneutics reflected in Ricoeur’s contemporary hermeneutics. Biblical hermeneutics
presumes that certain texts need to be interpreted in order to recover their deeper
meaning and that certain people are experts privileged to make these interpretations. A
culture, a philosophy, or a theology may inform the principles of interpretation, but a
hermeneutics itself is the exegesis of these principles. It is a reflection on the status of the
interpreters, the interpretations and other possibilities of meaning. Another important
feature of biblical hermeneutics reflected in Ricoeur’s work is the implicit assumption of
salvation. History, it is assumed, includes an eschatology, a promised paradise necessary
for a story’s coherence. Biblical hermeneutics also emphasizes historical and event
oriented forms of thought. In lieu of emphasizing ahistorical metaphysical categories
typical of the Hellenic tradition, Ricoeur follows the Judeo-Christian tradition and adopts
narrative as the structure of truth. Ihde (1995) characterizes Ricoeur’s hermeneutics as a
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“biblically styled historicity” that is event oriented and deeply sympathetic with the
Judaic and early Christian traditions of writing in parables. This emphasis on narrative is
uncommon in the kind of philosophical rationalism handed down through the Hellenic
traditions.
The biblical style of storied truth is essential to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, his
treatment of existential phenomenology, and his perspective on the philosophy of
language. However, Ricoeur is committed to working out the meaning of human
phenomena and not sacred texts. Ricoeur’s theological scholarship 2 concerns the
semantics of religious discourse, the relation between narrative and confessions of faith,
Kerygma, and revelation but he is not engaged in biblical hermeneutics. Theological
influences on Ricoeur’s work include the works of Donald Evans, John Macquarrie and
Langdon Gilkey as well as von Rad, Jeremias, Via, and Perrin and theological issues are
the subject of many articles collectively published in Conflict of Interpretations (Ricoeur,
1974)3.
Projecting a Three Volume Tome on Human Will
For the sake of delimiting the scope of this dissertation I have chosen to exclude Ricoeur’s work
in the areas of politics and theology. In principle Ricoeur’s hermeneutic can be understood
without exposition in these areas. Limiting my exegesis to the areas of philosophy of language and
existential phenomenology is more pertinent to my intention of using his understanding of
narrative and the creative potential of language to develop an understanding of the ways
psychotherapeutic discourse is of value.
3
Besides Ricoeur’s work in the areas of theology, he also wrote many papers on issues of politics.
Although his political essays appear sporadically over the course of his intellectual career, the
most extensive collection of such articles can be found in: Stewart, D., & Bien, J. (Eds.). (1974).
Political and social essays. Athens: Ohio University Press. This collection includes articles
originally published between the years 1952-73. For a comprehensive bibliography of Ricoeur’s
work see: Vansina, F. D., & Ricoeur, P. (1995). Bibliography of Paul Ricoeur: A primary and
2
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The very earliest writing of Ricoeur focus on issues of socialism, Christianity,
disarmament, and pacifism, but while imprisoned during the Second World War, Ricoeur
spent much time reading the complete works of Karl Jasper. The first book he published
after the war was Karl Jaspers et la Philosophie de l’Existence (1947), co-authored with
fellow prisoner and friend, Mikel Dufrenne. In this work Ricoeur focuses on explicating
Jaspers’ concept of the “situation-limite”, exemplified in such themes as evil, suffering,
and war. Ricoeur also became interested in Jaspers’ deciphering of symbolism used to
express transcendence (Reagan, 1996, p. 16). Much of Ricoeur’s early writing and his
first major work, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950/1966),
takes after Jaspers’ philosophy of existence (Reagan, 1996, p. 9). This work emphasizes
the importance of limits as conditions for the possibility of creativity and life.
Interested in aspects of consciousness that involve willing and inspired by
Jaspers’ three-volume work, Philosophie (1932), Ricoeur aspired to write a three-volume
opus called Philosophy of the Will. In the first volume, Freedom and Nature: The
Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950/1966) Ricoeur brackets the phenomena of fallibility
and human evil and proceeds to describe the most fundamental possibilities of human
will with its incumbent freedoms and restrictions. In the second volume, Ricoeur lifts the
restriction on ill will, but then cannot apply his previous exegesis of will. Instead a
different structure of inquiry is found to be required because the passage from innocence
to fault cannot be made strictly in terms of empirical description. He sees that evil has a
secondary systematic bibliography. In L. E. Hahn, The philosophy of Paul Ricoeur pp. 605-815.
Chicago: Open Court.
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paradoxical meaning in that ill will is both voluntary and involuntary, evil does us and we
do evil. This contradiction necessitates that such experiences be communicated in
symbolic narrative. Ricoeur’s analysis thus moves from an “empirics of will” to a
“mythics of bad will”. The second volume, Finitude and Culpability, consists of two
parts, Fallible Man (1960/1986) and The Symbolism of Evil (1960/1967). Although the
projected third volume was titled Poetics of Will, it was not actually written. In his later
work, Ricoeur concedes that his proposal to know beforehand what three volumes on the
topic of human will might include was youthful and impetuous.
Liberating Limitations of Freedom’s Constraint
Following Jaspers one of the central insight of the first volume, Freedom and
Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950/1966) is that freedom requires
constraint. When one consents to act, the voluntary becomes the backdrop of an
involuntary desire that provides motivation for a decision to act voluntarily. Involuntary
conditions provide a contextual background that makes choices possible. There is also a
reciprocal relationship between the voluntary and the involuntary. The freest of actions,
such as the case of making a decision, requires a field of possibilities contextualized by
impossibility. An intermediate amount of freedom, exemplified by voluntary movement,
encounters the involuntary as resistance, emotion, effort, and habit. The least voluntary
action of the will, exemplified by consent, encounters the field of the involuntary as most
nearly absolute. Ricoeur writes of consent to the absolute involuntary, “under the banner
of what I called character, the stable and absolutely unchosen figure of the existing being,
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life, that unpremeditated gift of birth, the unconscious, that forbidden zone, forever
inconvertible into actual consciousness” (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 12).
This early work on the proportional and mutually constituting relationship of
contraries is an early depiction of the movement of the dialectic present throughout
Ricoeur’s work. His profound insight into the way that the contrasts of voluntary and
involuntary are co-extensive, that one pole provides the conditions of possibility for the
other, begins with his studies of Jaspers and Marcel. The corresponding limitations of the
voluntary and the involuntary that shape possibilities is a concept similar to Jaspers’
concept of a “situation-limite” and Marcel’s concept of “incarnation”.
In The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950/1966) Ricoeur charts a paradoxical
position between the orthodox division of dualism and monism. He argues that the
involuntary in not simply an obstacle to freedom, not the fate to which we must consent
but freedom’s negative condition. There is reciprocity between constraint and freedom,
which forms a paradoxical relation rather than an either/or. Therefore, Ricoeur finds it
suitable to mix expressions and talks of the will as “acquiescing to its motive” and of
“consenting to involuntary motion”. Freedom is a process that unites initiative with
receptivity, action with passion, and is both self-determinate and determinate. “In this”,
Ricoeur writes, “our freedom is only human and reaches a complete understanding of
itself only with respect to some limit…” (Ricoeur, 1950/1966, p. 484). Human freedom is
not a hypothetical freedom, but rather incarnation is desire’s being. Human freedom is
motivated, but not fully rational. It always involves the unknown and an element of risk
and surprise.
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Mediating Non-Coincidence
In the first part of the second volume of Philosophy of the Will, Ricoeur removes
the brackets containing the eidetic analysis of will to consider the fallibility of the will, ill
will, and evil. Leaving behind the purely descriptive abstraction of fundamental
possibilities of will, as sketched in The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950/1966),
Ricoeur introduces the phenomena of fault in Fallible Man (1960/1986). Because fault is
not essential to the eidetic of will, Ricoeur does not make a descriptive analysis of
fallibility. He shifts to a different structure of inquiry and instead of describing the
passage from innocence to fault he inquires into how this experience is ontologically
expressed through narrative testimony.
In Fallible Man (1960/1986) Ricoeur asks ‘What is the human locus of evil?’ and
tells of how evil is a fallibility of will at the intersection of finitude and infinitude. As the
discrepancy between what is and what could be is realized, we become fragile and
fallible. Between the poles of finitude and the movement transgressing finitude, between
limitation and possibility, lays the realm of human fallibility. Both lesser and greater than
what one is, fallibility consists in mediating a certain non-coincidence of oneself with
oneself. Ricoeur (1960/1986) writes, “The fact that the self is at variance with itself is
the indefeasible worm in the fruit of the immediate” (p. 30).
Ricoeur borrows from the work of Pascal to speak of this discrepancy as an
“ontology of disproportion”. What we have is always within the context of what we can
imagine and so there is always the possibility of something more. Awareness of
consciousness moves us away from where we are at, pulled by desire away from where
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we are, toward the other than what is. Ricoeur (1960/1986) quotes Pascal, “For after all,
what is man in nature? A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an all in comparison
with nothing, a mean between nothing and all” (p. 13). Sitting precariously between
everything and nothing is not evil, but rather the place in which fallibility arises. The
paradoxical fallibility of being human resides in meaning which is at the mercy of the
involuntary. We are aware of our fallibility and of everything else we might be but are
not.
Ricoeur identifies three zones of human fallibility: the frailty of the imagination
operating between the infinity of intention and the finite perspective of perception, the
vulnerability of respect mediating between the infinity of happiness and the finitude of
character, and the fallibility of being divided between intimacy and openness to the
totality of things, people, and ideas (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 15). Although he does not return to
these themes of fallibility and disproportion as they are originally conceived he touches
on them in the final chapter of Oneself as Another (1990/1992) in a different form.
Instead of the threefold fallibility of imagination, respect, and feeling, he returns to the
theme of human frailty in more general terms of “otherness”. I will take up this concept
of otherness in chapter four in terms of the function of psychotherapy as the recognition
of another.
Fallibility Illuminated in Expression: The Symbolism of Evil
The move we have been examining from an empirics of the will to a mythics of
fallibility is completed in the second part of the Philosophy of the Will: Finitude and
Culpability. Here Ricoeur makes his first complete venture into hermeneutics and
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symbolism and explains how the language of myths cannot simply be inserted into the
language of philosophy. The symbolic language of avowal used to express the passage
from innocence to fault (e.g. in tales of chaos, exile, divine blinding, and tortuous paths)
is a figurative language that must be interpreted to be understood. The stories are not
taken at face value in terms of empirical description but are figurative and symbolic. A
hermeneutics is required if the significance of the myths and symbols used to express the
experience of fallibility are to be reinserted into one’s understanding of being. Thus the
language of avowal reveals an astonishing function of narrative: self-understanding can
only be reached by way of analogy expressed through those symbolic narratives that
require a hermeneutics. Ricoeur takes this up in his later work on time and narrative but
first he deeply explores symbolic and mythical expressions of evil.
In The Symbolism of Evil (1960/1967) he inquires into those symbols that are
used to express experiences of evil and fault. In a kind of anthropology of ill will,
Ricoeur relocates the existence of evil and fallibility in the limits of the will as it is
revealed in the telling of experience. In his “Intellectual Autobiography” (1995), Ricoeur
says of evil and fault, “it just comes about, it happens, in the manner of an event that one
recounts” (p. 17). Finding no phenomenological or structural basis for the origin of evil,
he determines that it is the symbolic expressions of limitation conveyed in myths and
symbols that reveal the presence of evil and fallibility. The power of symbols can express
the paradox of ill will. There is no unambiguous meaning of the will’s limitation. Only
when evil is avowed in symbolic expression is the paradox of the experience revealed.
The duality of fallibility and evil arises by way of expressing a will that is both free and
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bound. Its presence is known through its telling which reinstates the poles of finitude and
infinitude of will. This paradox of limitation and possibility of human will is symbolized
in narratives of human existence. Thus, the avowal of one’s existence must be
approached through the interpretation of symbolic expression. It is from this point on that
hermeneutics becomes central to Ricoeur’s philosophy.
In turning to symbols, Ricoeur rejects orthodox phenomenology and implicitly
critiques the apodicticity of the cogito common to Husserl, Descartes, Fichte, and Hume.
In an interview with Charles Reagan (1996), Ricoeur says of the hermeneutics that he has
been practicing since 1960,
It is a kind of mourning of the immediate, and the recognition that we have only an
indirect relationship to what is; we shall discuss whether we have to keep the
expression “what is.” But, at any rate, the first application of the term
“hermeneutics” is that we have to give up the project of intuitionist philosophy. (p.
100)
Ricoeur tends to take an anthropological stand to focus on objects of consciousness
rather than the less accessible faculties of consciousness. For example, the action of
perceiving is phenomenologically more difficult to access than the objects perceived. His
approach distances him from a concept self-understanding that is immediate, direct, and
transparent. Meaning is not in the immediacy of awareness but is regained through the
system of signs that mediate and relate us indirectly to reality. In this way Ricoeur
develops psychology into a theory of signification. Understandings of origins, accounts of
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fallibility, and experiences of evil are disentangled from theories of knowledge as selfawareness and become decipherable in publicly accessible texts and actions.
One central insight of The Symbolism of Evil (1960/1967) is that the experience
of evil is always expressed symbolically. Positive aspects of volition such as choosing,
deciding, willing, or “being able to” are conveyed metaphorically so as also to capture
both the bound and involuntary aspects of these experience. The Symbolism of Evil
(1960/1967) is devoted to starting with the symbol. Here Ricoeur’s hermeneutics
promotes the integrity of symbols. Evil is understood in terms of what thoughts the
symbols (e.g., stain, weight, deviancy, alienation, captivity) give rise to. Ricoeur is not
yet interested in inquiring into the nature of symbols, at this point in his work he is
preoccupied with expressions that depict a sense of being both the victims and
perpetrators of evil.
Ricoeur’s later work on identity is foreshadowed in The Symbolism of Evil
(1960/1967). By detouring through symbols and myths the analysis of understanding is
delayed, but in becoming conscious of the ambiguities of meaning the importance of tacit
understanding is enriched. Interpreting the symbols and myths used to express existence
brings to light hopes and desires, reasons and motivations that mediate between “the self
and itself”. Meaningful existence becomes constituted by an understanding that mingles
with awareness of one’s historical and cultural presence in a world. By exploring the
human phenomena of evil Ricoeur elucidates a general principle of self-understanding
that is not fully worked out until thirty years later in Oneself as Another (1990/1992). The
meaning of who we are or what the self is, is neither immediate nor intuitive. Reflection
21
and narrative are necessary to become aware of and to understand our world and what we
are. One’s expressions are not self-evidently meaningful, but require a hermeneutics, an
interpretation or something other for understanding to emerge. Understanding, however,
need not determine a new metaphysical category of truth. The fragmentary effect of
reflection is a significant constraint upon understanding that eschews idealism by
ensuring that the task of reflection is never complete and the occasional nature of
conscious understanding ensures the never-ending value of interpretation.
Idiosyncratic Falsifications: Ricoeur and Lacan
The next major work of Ricoeur’s is Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation (1965/1970). Ricoeur was first exposed to the thought of Freud at the age
of 17 by his high school philosophy professor Roland Dalbiez, who according to Ricoeur
(Reagan, 1996) was the first philosopher to write a book on Freud and psychoanalysis in
France. Dalbiez modeled for Ricoeur the gentle art of “disputing the question”, a style of
argument harking back to academics of the fourteenth century. It was also at this early
age that Ricoeur found his adversary in idealism and fought against its potential
emptiness, narcissism, and circularity. Ricoeur credits Dalbiez for disillusioning any
belief in the cogito giving us direct and immediate access to what is. Ricoeur appreciated
Freud for his naturalistic realism and his treatment of narrative as more than literal.
Between the years 1958 and 1961 Ricoeur read the entire collected works of Freud and
from 1960 to 1963 he attended Lacan’s seminars on psychoanalysis. Freud and
Philosophy (1965/1970) is based on a series of lectures Ricoeur gave in 1961 at Yale
University and a series of eight lectures he gave in 1962 at Louvain.
22
Elisabeth Roudinesco (1986/1990) tells an important story of the falling out
between Ricoeur and Lacan. It seems that Lacan had hopes of securing a comrade in his
psychoanalytic endeavours and having been rejected by Merleau-Ponty, his hopes hung
on Ricoeur. Lacan heard Ricoeur speak on the topic of psychoanalysis and was
outspokenly complimentary of Ricoeur’s work. Later, at a colloquium in Rome, Lacan
asked Ricoeur what he thought of his work. Ricoeur confessed that in general he found
Lacan’s theories incomprehensible. Lacan was infuriated by his honesty. Insult was
added to injury when Ricoeur’s major opus on psychoanalysis, Freud and Philosophy
(1965/1970), made no mention of Lacan except by way of a footnote. However, later, in
Ricoeur’s Intellectual Autobiography of 1995, Ricoeur writes of Lacan’s excellence as a
clinician, his originality of thought, authenticity of interpretation, and importance in
providing a counterpoint to the American medicalization of psychoanalysis (p. 18).
Ricoeur explains that in Freud and Philosophy (1965/1970) he chose to ignore
contemporary innovations in psychoanalysis and dealt with Freud as he would any other
philosopher concentrating on the original text.
Ricoeur’s intentions were misunderstood and vitriolic criticism ensued from the
camp of the Lacanians. In one incredibly insolent review of Ricoeur’s work on
psychoanalysis, Ricoeur is accused of plagiarizing Lacan’s ideas: “Et lorsqu’ils ne le
paraphrasaient pas, ils en faisaient le plagiat” (Valabréga, 1966, p. 73). Not because his
work was being criticized, but because his personal integrity was being questioned,
Ricoeur chose to defend himself against his critic (Ricoeur, 1966). His response points to
how ideas are not owned, but appropriated from all of the people one hears and reads. He
23
acknowledges the many influences on his work, and reminds his critics that he had been
studying and giving lectures on Freud before he knew of Jacques Lacan. Further to his
defence, Roudinesco (1986/1990) points out the many ways that Ricoeur misunderstands
Lacan’s theories and develops radically different interpretations of the same
psychoanalytic concepts. Ricoeur (1995) concedes that the “the most well-founded
reproach that the Lacanians were able to address to me was that of having understood
nothing of Lacan” (p. 21).
Ricoeur’s understanding of Freud develops assumptions and implications beyond
what is claimed in the original psychoanalytic theory of Freud. While Freud, master of
suspicion, dispels illusion with analysis, Ricoeur extends psychoanalysis into a dialectic
tension of suspicion and faith that reveals desires as it dispels them. Coming to
psychoanalysis by way of his investigations into the symbolism of evil, Ricoeur sees
expressions of guilt and fallibility as having a double meaning. Whereas Ricoeur’s
hermeneutics in The Symbolism of Evil (1960/1967) ends with what he later
acknowledges to be too narrow a definition of symbolism, later he finds that the
polysemy of symbols cannot be realized outside of the ontological context of a hearing or
a reading and he expands the field appropriate to the discipline of hermeneutics from
symbol to narrative. Ricoeur (1967) writes of the connection between phenomenology
and the philosophy of language that “the question of language is no longer a particular
problem, it is part of the environment of meaning, the network of signs covering our field
of perception, action and living” (p. 11). Relying on context and understanding symbols
in terms of acts of communication he extends the psychoanalytic method of
24
interpretation to a double hermeneutic such that symbols can be interpreted as both
strictly Freudian in terms of their origin or motivation and more Hegelian in terms of
their amplifying power of signification.
Ricoeur and Psychoanalysis: Freud and Philosophy
In Fallible Man (1960/1986) Ricoeur studies human fragility and the phenomenon
of guilt. His concern is with the expression of these experiences in The Symbolism of
Evil (1960/1967). He extends his inquiry of fault and ambiguities of will in Freud and
Philosophy (1965/1970). Here he takes up psychoanalysis and considers limitations and
possibilities in terms of the voluntary and involuntary aspects of desire. Ricoeur (1995)
writes of his original interest in psychoanalysis, “It was obviously the theme of guilt that
first led me to Freud’s domain” (p. 19). In his hermeneutic re-reading of Freud’s
psychoanalysis Ricoeur writes not of the symbols or myths of desire, but of the language
of desire; the ways that desire is both spoken and fails to speak.
The hermeneutics that Ricoeur practices in The Symbolism of Evil (1960/1967) is
different from the hermeneutics that he sees Freud practicing in The Interpretation of
Dreams (1900/1953). This is explicated in Freud and Philosophy (1965/1970) where
Ricoeur works out the tension between Freud’s reductive hermeneutics and his own
amplifying hermeneutics. Freudian analysis deals in narratives of guilt and desire, and
produces reductive interpretations. The Symbolism of Evil (1960/1967) deals with
similar narratives, but attends to the surplus of meaning inherent in the symbol; thereby
proliferating and amplifying the hope of will rather than unearthing its hidden
motivations. It is this double hermeneutic and the emerging complexities unveiled by the
25
polysemy of representation which sparks Ricoeur’s interest in Freud to the point of his
writing a five hundred and fifty page “essay” on interpretation in psychoanalysis
(Ricoeur, 1965/1970).
Ricoeur’s reinterpretation of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics began with the
amplifying effect of interpretation inherent in the reading of the symbols of evil and
developed to include the doubly productive and reductive effect of interpretation inherent
in psychoanalytic narratives of desire. Dreams, memories, and symptoms are taken as the
products of unconscious conflicts of desire in the psyche that speak to wishes and hope
for possible worlds. The risk of psychoanalytic interpretation to reduce all expressions to
secret desirous motivations betrays for Ricoeur a complementary productive expansion of
meaning carrying with it an eschatology and hope for the future. As Reagan sees it,
“[Ricoeur’s] work on Freud is a continuation of his work on human fragility and the
symbolic expression of sinfulness” (p. 28), wherein a hermeneutic of faith is an implied
dialectic complement of his hermeneutic of evil.
Freud and Philosophy (1965/1970) contains three books: the “Problematic”, the
“Analytic” and the “Dialectic”. The first book secures a place for psychoanalysis within
the philosophy of language. It gives the problem of symbolism in language a
psychoanalytic hermeneutic and treats multivocality, interpretation, and intention in
terms of the semantics of desire. Ricoeur titles this book “A Reading of Freud”. It is a
reading that demonstrates how psychoanalysis intentionally and justifiably employs an
ambiguous narrative of desire. Ricoeur (1995) writes of his formulation of
psychoanalytic thought,
26
I came to present Freudian explanation as a mixed discourse, mixing together the
language of force (drive, cathexis, condensation, displacement, repression, return of
the repressed, and so on) and that of meaning (thought, wish, intelligibility,
absurdity, disguise, interpretation, interpolation, and so on). And I justified this
mixed discourse by the mixed nature of its object, situated at the point of inflexion
of desire and language. (p. 20)
Desire is a motive, but not exactly a techno-mechanical cause. Desire appropriates
meaning through the symbolic language used in communicating desire4. In the first book
of Freud and Philosophy (1965/1970) Ricoeur lays out the psychoanalytic framework for
reading the language of desire with its multiple meanings and conflictual dynamics. Here
psychoanalysis is re-worked as a hermeneutics of desire.
In the second book, the “Analytic”, Ricoeur argues for a reading of
psychoanalysis as philosophy. Ricoeur insists on giving psychoanalysis the status of
philosophy. This means that it is not necessary to be trained in psychoanalysis nor
psychoanalyzed in order to read and understand Freud. Reading through the original
writings of Freud, Ricoeur chronologically traces the successive developments of
psychoanalytic thought from the pure energetics of The Project (1895/1966) to the
combined energetics and hermeneutics of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953). He
addresses the various topographies of the psyche proposed by Freud, rules for the
interpretation of derivative representations generated from the dynamics of the psyche,
4
Ricoeur writes most explicitly about the synthesis of desire and will in imagination in Freedom
and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950/1966), pp. 88-104.
27
the relations between psyche and culture, and Freud’s speculations on Eros, Thanatos and
Ananke.
In the final book of Freud and Philosophy (1965/1970), the “Dialectic”, Ricoeur
expresses perhaps his deepest insight into psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, he argues, is
not a natural science, nor is it phenomenology, nor purely hermeneutic, rather it is a
dialectical hermeneutics dealing with the tension between phenomena and interpretation
that invokes divergent readings. Psychoanalysis does not meet the phenomenological
assumption of empiricism and because of the analytic practice neither is it purely
interpretive. Psychoanalysis reduces meaning to the forces of desire while also producing
a multiplicity of significance. Reagan (1996) explains how Ricoeur wanted to fit Freud’s
writing into a larger architectonic, to fit the unconscious work of ciphering our desire
within the possibility of revealing the sacred. Desire is an irrepressible urge to fulfill an
incompleteness at the heart of being but is also an eschatological testimony of faith. The
desire for power, for having, and for worth known by the moralist as the drive for
domination, possession, and pretension, involves a complementary hermeneutic of hope,
faith, and forgiveness. In this book Ricoeur begins to use Merleau-Ponty’s phrase the
“archaeology of the subject” to describe the psychoanalytic method of unearthing drives
from the speech of the analysand and he adds to this a complimentary “teleology of the
subject” which amplifies desires’ intent as hope is narrated in terms of the history of a
desire. Understanding is evident at the junction of archaeological and teleological
interpretations. We explain purposes in terms of motivation and understand motivations
in terms of purposes. Ricoeur tells us that he owes to his study of Freud the important
28
insight that these kinds of conflicts of meaning are inevitable because all interpretation is
only ever partial. Understanding is thus a process experienced through the exchange of
interpretations.
Ricoeur ends his writing of Freud in part due to the altercations he experienced
with the Lacanians, but also because his dialectical hermeneutics led him to a more
general thesis of hermeneutics and narration. Once he worked the dialectics of
psychoanalytic interpretation, the innovative process of representation, interpretation,
and understanding was taken as a general principle of narrative. His interest in
psychoanalysis ended with an appreciation for the fruitfulness of dialogical tension.
Unlike Freud’s hermeneutics of suspicion Ricoeur’s hermeneutics involves a conflict of
interpretation between suspicion and faith. On Ricoeur’s account, Freud is a master of
suspicion and psychoanalysis a sceptical philosophy. Freud unmasks the illusion of
meaning and upsets our ordinary sense of certainty. But Ricoeur goes further and sees
psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics that works at the intersection of desire and language
enacted in a world. Thus, in the process of interpreting the unconscious and uncovering
the semantics of desire, there is implied an eschatological hope as interpretation moves
beyond what is toward what might become. It is Ricoeur’s reinterpretation of faith in
terms of what might become and his explication of the recreative force of language that
makes the desire inherent in all action and the articulation of desire in language conceal
desire as it reveals possibility.
The Dialectical Nature of Human Phenomena in Ricoeur’s Philosophy
29
Given the central place of the dialectic in Ricoeur’s conception of the conflict of
interpretation it is worth considering more closely what he means by this concept. In
1975 he wrote “Le ‘Lieu’ de la Dialectique”, translated as What is Dialectical?
(1975/1976). In lectures given at the University of Kansas, Ricoeur outlines ideas on
dialectics, clarifies the influences of Kant and Hegel on his thought, and delineates his
own unique version of dialectical resolution. For Ricoeur, as for Kant and Hegel,
dialectic means “certain things do not exist or are not known unless another, opposite
thing exists or is known at the same time” (p. 173). The opposition, however, does not
reduce to nothing, neither logically by the contradiction of propositions, nor physically,
by the perfect equilibrium of opposing forces; rather, the opposition of a dialectic is a
productive opposition that “permits, encourages, or generates a new thing, in reality or in
experience, qualitatively distinct from the opposing terms” (p. 173). For Ricoeur there is
no place for the dialectic in the realm of logic. Formal logic cannot capture the
ambiguity, indifference, contradiction, aporia, and paradox of the dialectic. The only
place for the operation of a dialectic is in the realm of human reality, praxis, and action.
Ricoeur’s concern in Freud and Philosophy (1965/1970) is one of preserving the fullness
of the diverse uses of language. Language both conceals and reveals. It cannot be reduced
to one function or the other without stagnating in certainty of meaning. Only a dialectic
can account for the possibility of insights and the on-going generation of fresh meaning.
In Ricoeur’s reading of psychoanalysis the dialectic melds suspicion with faith in
a tension that communicates both the depth of one’s appetite and the reasoned and
planned action of the will. In theory (i.e. the metapsychology of psychoanalysis), the ego
30
works through this productive tension formed between the id and superego. This
mediation comes to replace a dysfunctional and nearly ruptured dialectic ruled by either
“the “thing-like” character of the structures of the unconscious” (Ricoeur, 1975/1976, p.
177) or the punitive and restrictive hyper-rationalism of consciousness. The id has no
substance of its own. It is all shadow in the light of desire, real as a transcendental
deduction is real and known by the products of its relationship with the superego.
Ihde (1974) points out that Ricoeur’s dialectical method can seem formulaic
except that it continually invokes a “complex matrix of difference” (p. 67) and not a
mechanical opposition. The resolution of the dialectic in a perfect synthesis is never
achieved. Regardless of how thick the hermeneutic there always remains a mysterious
non-coincidence of life and meaning along with the possibility of something more.
Continuously respectful of difference and unceasingly generative of significance the
dialectic is not to be confused with the totalizing dialectic of Hegel. There is no ultimate
resolution, no final resting place, end of meaning or history, but rather never ending
stories that trace out traditions in the event oriented and biblically styled history which
Ricoeur favours (Ihde, 1974, p. 66). The transcendental is not absolute; but occasional
and partial, so there can be an unceasing advancement of meaning in life’s actions.
Metaphor/Reference & Narrative/Time
Ricoeur continues his study of meaning’s regeneration beyond the context of
desire, will and fallibility in The Rule of Metaphor (1975/1978). This is an important
work because it marks the transition from the hermeneutics of will to the function of
narration. Most of this book explores various contemporary analytic and continental
31
theories of metaphor. Ricoeur is struck by how semiotic research has shifted from
focusing on the word to the sentence as the place where meaning emerges. The
innovative potential of language is not due to a word being used as a “deviant naming”.
Metaphors do not simply point out and replace more literal descriptions, they also convey
fresh meaning and this is due to the “peculiar predication” entailed when resemblances
are used in sentences that break the subject predicate conformity just enough to
communicate the sense of things (Ricoeur, 1983). In this way discerning resemblances
establishes new semantic relevance.
In the seventh study, “Metaphor and Reference”, Ricoeur most fully develops his
understanding of metaphor. For Ricoeur metaphors are non-literal reproductions of the
world and an opportunity to experience alternatives through language. Reagan (1996)
likens this insight to Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” where the world in which one lives
meets the horizon of the world in which one could live (p. 43). Understanding a
metaphor, Ricoeur argues, is an instance of the same problem one is faced with when
trying to understand a text. A metaphor is like a text in miniature with the same
hermeneutic problems of interpretation and multiple meaning. Metaphors not only
reproduce the meanings of their reference, they also produce meanings by bringing
together the real with the similar in the imagination. Poetic language, thus, creates a new
reference for the world, an extended relation to the world if not a new world. However,
Ricoeur does not lose hold of the tension between horizons and at no point does the
productive imagination completely submerge the reproductive imagination, nor does the
reproductive imagination forget its productive reference. Although metaphor has the
32
power to create new ways of understanding, creation is revelation and invention
discovery. Ricoeur insists that revelation is intractable from something else that is absent.
A deviance of meaning must retain a degree of relationship to something else. In this way
semantic innovation still makes sense.
Ricoeur’s more complete shift of focus from the double hermeneutics of symbols,
texts, and psychoanalysis to the generative potentials of representation in narrative is
marked by his three-volume work Time and Narrative Vols. I, II, II. Before publishing
these three volumes in the 1980’s, Reagan points out that Ricoeur wrote three important
articles in the 1970’s prefiguring his theory of narrativity. I will briefly review these
articles in order to help fill out the direction of Ricoeur’s thought. “The Model of the
Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text”, published in 1971, is a seminal paper on
social research. Here Ricoeur proposes that human action can be read like a text and that
hermeneutic rules for interpreting and understanding can be applied in such nonlinguistic realms as human action. He recasts the human sciences as hermeneutics with
methodologies comparable to the kinds of procedures used in text interpretation.
The second article that sets the stage for Ricoeur’s theory of narrativity is
“Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable Connections among the Theory
of Text, Theory of Action and Theory of History” (Ricoeur, 1978). In this article Ricoeur
begins to distinguish his place in the tradition of hermeneutics. Contrary to the early
claims of Dilthey, Ricoeur does not consider explanation and understanding
incommensurable. He proposes instead to narrate the tension between understanding and
explanation, which thereby expands the meaning of both. He takes the purpose of
33
explaining as understanding and the aim of understanding as explanation. In the case of
interpreting an action, explaining the cause of the action provides an understanding of the
motive and intention of the action. In this same article, Ricoeur gives an account of how
storytelling is a form of explanation that begins once the immediacy of action has passed
and how it is hoped that understanding will follow the telling. In this ways there is a noncoincidence but interdependence of explanation and understanding.
The third article, “Narrative Time” published in 1980, begins Ricoeur’s analysis
of time and the puzzling relationship between time and narrative. Ricoeur’s seminal
contribution to literary theory consists of this analysis of narrative and time. In this work
Ricoeur demonstrates how time is the product of narrative configurations and the human
need to reckon with time in our relations with others. Time for Ricoeur is always the time
of “being-with-others”. Ricoeur develops a narrative conception of time that escapes both
idiographic illusion of sequence and the a-chronology of paradigms and nomological
laws. Time is brought to life and finds its ultimate reference in narratives of ourselves
and others when we reckon with events taking place before, after, or until; or in
narratives of how we take time, waste time, and have time. Telling the stories of our
lives, we are more precisely telling the time of our lives, figuring our place in time in
relation to the significant others that populate our world. But these stories do not emerge
whole and coherent in the first telling. Narrative fragments stumble out and the story only
begins to cohere in the back and forth of dialogue; interpretations are ventured, some
falter some stay. Eventually, episodes are configured by plot into a sequence and
meaning emerges in their coherence.
34
Time and Narrative is Ricoeur’s major work and it divides into four parts. The
first volume has two parts while volumes two and three have one part each. In volume 1,
the first part is concerned with Augustine’s analysis of time, Aristotle’s exposition of the
function of emplotment, and Ricoeur’s own theory of narrative in terms of “mimesis”5.
There are three levels of mimesis. Mimesis I is our preconfigured understanding. It is
what allows us to distinguish, for example, action from movement. In this first form of
mimesis our preunderstanding of the temporal structure of action is incarnate in norms
and rules of behaviour. This preconfigured intelligibility is similar to what the
reproductive imagination is grasping in the metaphor. The second form of mimesis,
Mimesis II, configures actions in meaningful relationships. This is similar to Ricoeur’s
analysis of the productive referent of the metaphor, but here the relationship is achieved
by emplotment; that is, by the plot making sense of the discordance of actions. Mimesis
II produces narrative and through its communication it opens to interpretation by another.
The third form of representation, Mimesis III, involves the power of narrative to
reconfigure the world of the interpreters. Narrative is understood because it makes
reference to one’s actual life. What is unreal thus reconfigures what is real and meaning
is appropriated into one’s own world. In this way narrative remakes the meaning of
events.
In the second part of Volume 1 Ricoeur provides a detailed exposition of what
might be called a positivist position characterized by rejecting any place for narrative in
5
Mimesis is a Greek word meaning imitation, modeling or reproduction, the simulation of one
thing by another.
35
historiography. Ricoeur identifies this as a basic error due to a failure to recognize the
intelligibility conferred on all narratives by configuration or emplotment. History
conceived as a disconnected series of events is naïve to the configurational dimension at
the basis of all intelligibility. Laws in the social sciences take on meaning because they
are part of a prior narrative that selects certain events as significant. The recreative
structure of narrative touches the barest of facts. Arguing for the inextricable role of
narrative in history Ricoeur concludes that all narrative is a combination of history and
fiction, of conformity to documents and narrative coherence.
In Volume 2 of Time and Narrative (1984/1985) Ricoeur illustrates the mimetic
possibilities of narrative using extensive examples from the literature of literary
criticism. This work is very specific to the discipline of literary criticism and its details
are unnecessary to gain an understanding of Ricoeur’s general theory of narrative
hermeneutics.
In the third and final volume Ricoeur takes up the debate between metaphysical
speculations on the nature of time and phenomenological experiences of everyday time.
He uses the work of Augustine, Husserl, and Heidegger to portray the phenomenological
sense of time, and the work of Aristotle, Kant, and contemporary physics to portray
metaphysical conceptions of time. Here Ricoeur elaborates the puzzling relationships
between existential experiences of time and the objective dimension of cosmological
time. In his characteristically dialectical fashion, he argues that each perspective relies on
the presupposition of the other for its coherence while at the same time one perspective
conceals the other’s presence. By integrating history and fiction, the mimetic function of
36
narrative configuration bridges everyday experiences of time and the boundless eternity
implied by the possibility of understanding. Narration references our wilful involvement
in destiny. It unifies past, present, and future and mediates between future expectation,
inherited tradition, and present moments of initiative.
There are two central theses to Ricoeur’s theory of narrativity. First and foremost
he strives to gather together diverse forms of story making. He proposes a common
reference for both descriptive forms of narration and fictional narratives in the temporal
quality of recounting experience. “Everything that is recounted”, he writes, “occurs in
time, takes time, unfolds temporally; and what unfolds in time can be recounted”
(Ricoeur, 1983, p. 176). Temporal experience is the ultimate referent of all narrative
genres. Thus, all narrative modes including history, biography, and autobiography as well
as epics, dramas, and novels are similar by virtue of their common temporal character.
The central insight is that time and the structure of narrative accompany all forms of
meaning. Ricoeur sums up, “it was as an ordering of time that narrative configuration
was submitted to investigation” (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 46) and through this investigation it
was revealed that time was the unifying referent of all narration.
The second thesis central to Ricoeur’s theory of narrativity deals with the
phenomenon of how textual composition brings about semantic innovation. Emplotment
innovatively combines intentions, causes, and chance. Events are put into the form of a
plot having beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in that order. The
composition makes the events intelligible while also betraying an indirect reference to
past intelligibility. An event is already understood as contributing to the plot prior to the
37
meaning revealed by the whole. This is an important point worth highlighting because it
seems to have been lost in both systemic and psychoanalytic versions of narrative
therapy6. Although narration generates possibilities of new meaning, a narrative
hermeneutics does not deny the preconfigured meaning of events.
While narrative reconfigures the experience of the teller it also completes its
course of meaning in the experience of the teller. Narrative reshapes experience and
produces new references, but it cannot become detached from its indirect reference to
history without becoming incoherent or at least ineffectual. Ricoeur (1983) writes, “If the
world of the text were without any assignable relation to the real world, then language
would not be “dangerous’, in the sense in which Hölderlin called it so before both
Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin” (p. 181). Narrative says “being”. The productive
reference of narrative presupposes a way of living and being in the world which precedes
the story and demands to be said.
The “ontological vehemence” underlying Ricoeur’s philosophy of language
insists that there is a “being-to-be-said” prior to any saying. Language is used to aim at a
certain ontology, a way of “being-in-the-world”. As such, his discussion of refiguring the
6
See for example the anti-ontological overemphasis of the productive reference in the following:
Schafer, R. (1992). Retelling a life: Narration and dialogue in psychoanalysis. New York:
Basic Books.
Schafer, R. (1976). A new language for psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Spence, D. (1982). Narrative truth and historical truth. New York: Norton.
White, M. (1997). Narratives of therapists’ lives. Adelaide, Australia: Dulwich Centre
Publications.
White, M. (1995). Re-authoring lives: Interviews & essays. Adelaide, Australia: Dulwich
Centre Publications.
White, M. & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: Norton.
38
world through narrative is in dialectical tension with the world preconfigured in the being
that seeks to be said. Hermeneutics in two distinct ways includes the act of inhabiting a
world. First, language redirects our attention to focus on the meaning that is conveyed
and second language conceals a reference to a world being inhabited.
The double hermeneutics of Ricoeur’s earlier work on symbol and interpretation
is extended into otology through his analysis of narrative’s slippery relation to time.
There is not a strict correlation between time and narrative, rather being and re-counting
being continually generates remainder. Ricoeur states in an interview with Reagan (1996)
that,
Narrativity does not take hold of time… we never recover time…exactly as I say that
we respond to the aporia of temporality through the creativity of narrative, we could
say that this attempt itself is aporetic. There is an aporia of the response because the
narrative is not capable of overcoming all the aporias of temporality. (p. 114-5)
The aporia7 is consequent to the distance introduced by narrative between life as lived
and life as recounted and it can never be overcome once and for all. Ricoeur (1983)
writes, “It is due to this complex interplay between the indirect reference to the past and
the productive reference of fiction that human experience in its profound temporal
dimension never ceases to be shaped” (p. 182). The continual non-coincidence of
narrative and life betrays a constant striving toward completeness at the depth of
7
An aporia is a doubt introduced by evidence both for and against where to begin or what to do; a
Greek word meaning being at a loss or at an impasse.
39
existence. For Ricoeur, the hermeneutic work of analyzing, contrasting, and interpreting
new meaning are the phenomena of that disjuncture.
There is a notable difference between Ricoeur’s narrative hermeneutics and other
narrative philosophers. Most notably David Carr (1986) argues that life is lived as
narrative. From this perspective narrative and life are temporally continuous without
significant disjuncture. Unlike Ricoeur, Carr does not focus on how beginning, middle
and end, characteristic of stories are both imposed upon and emergent from discordant
elements of reality. Narrative, for Carr, is not separate from reality; rather life events
have the inherent structure of narrative sequence. He writes that stories “are told in being
lived and lived in being told” (Carr, 1986, p. 126). Ricoeur would agree that it is a
mistake to think, exclusively, that life is first lived and only afterwards makes sense
through reflection and narration. Life is meaningful as lived by virtue of possibilities
realized in narrative. Carr emphasizes the lived aspect of narrative by focusing on how
narrative structure is continuously inherent in human events and he argues that narrative
cannot be untrue or a distortion of life because life is storied. Ricoeur, however, focuses
on both functions of narrative, the lived action of narration and awareness of that action.
Taken together he sees the disjunction necessary for such discursive phenomena as
recognition, insight, and revelation, but also misunderstanding and fallibility.
Passing Identities
The final work of Ricoeur’s relevant to the current project of understanding the
value and possibility of transformative meaning through the function of narrative in
reflective conversation is his more recent book Oneself as Another (1990/1992). There
40
are two main themes in this book. First, he deals with the dialectic of idem and ipse8 and
the tension between self-sameness and identity. A second theme deals with attestation
and truth. Attestation is a level of truth in between Descartes’ indubitable and
foundational cogito and Nietzsche’s anti-cogito that trades in the illusion of facts and
capricious interpretations. The hermeneutics of the self is equal distance from these two
extremes. Attestation, Ricoeur suggests, is the level of certainty appropriate for
hermeneutics. It is not a foundational claim but a testimonial claim; a claim to what one
believes in. Therefore, it is simultaneously vulnerable to suspicion and dependent on
faith. Ricoeur’s reference here to faith is not blind faith, but post-critical faith. He
(1990/1992) writes, “this faith assumes its own insecurity, which makes it a chance
happening transformed into a destiny by means of a choice constantly renewed, in the
scrupulous respect of different choices” (p. 25). The greatest assurance against suspicion,
Ricoeur tells us, is the faith that no matter what happens one will always be oneself
acting and struggling. Such an attestation to being is equidistant between foundational
and illusory claims to being. Attestations, unlike illusions, are trustworthy beyond a
reasonable doubt, although not beyond all suspicion. Reagan (1996) describes Ricoeur’s
take on truth as follows: “The criterion of truth is not the verifiability of a description,
but the confidence in a testimony” (p. 81). Hermeneutic truth involves the narratives of
promise.
8
Idem and ipse are Latin terms both conveying sameness. Idem is sameness without implying
difference over time. Idem has the qualities of numerical identity, extreme resemblance, and
conveys a sense of permanence while all else changes. Ipse is the sameness of self as exemplified
41
In Oneself as Another (1990/1992) Ricoeur also takes notice of the everyday
language we use to talk about ourselves. At first Ricoeur is primarily concerned with the
question of “Who?” Who is acting? Of whom does one speak? Who is at the centre of the
story being told? He goes on to focus on the sameness of the subject that cannot be
defined as idem; that is, sameness in terms of permanence in time. Only metaphysics can
permit the illusion of such substantial and permanent subjectivity. In everyday
experience, narration comes to determine the subject as the one who acted in such and
such a way. The sameness configured by narrative is ipse. The sameness of the self
referred to does not mean the subject is identical, but that the subject is the same person.
Understanding oneself as the same derives from the stories one tells of oneself, the
promises one makes, and the moral relationships one has with others. Consciousness of
oneself is a narrative understanding that continually transforms the meaning of one’s
being in the world. Thus, a person’s identity is configured historically through the
interpreted actions she herself re-produces. These interpretations rely on the otherness of
the self and the relationship between the self and the other.
Again in Oneself as Another (1990/1992) Ricoeur is dealing with generative
tensions. First there is the tension between identity as ipse and idem; second the tension
between experience of the self and the experience of the self as other. In this Ricoeur
follows Hegel where the self is seen to be defined in terms of an “other”. Ricoeur extends
this thesis to consider the self as constituted in narrative negotiations of what is other and
by personal identity over time and attestations such as “you yourself” (e.g. ipse dixit means he
himself said it).
42
what is same. Ricoeur does not defend the idealistic hope that the self can be directly
transparent to itself; rather, understanding of the self must be mediated through narration.
Thus, awareness of the self is an ever-retreating horizon of immediateness, a horizon that
is usurped by reflection. Understanding must take a long and winding road through
reflections on the world and the conditions in which it finds itself to receive and recount
the meaning of its being. The hermeneutic twist is that the self one becomes aware of is a
self other than the self that initially undertook the journey. Ricoeur avoids falling into an
idealism of the self by asserting the fragmentary and occasional nature of identity. He
writes, “the self could return home only at the end of a long journey. And it is “as
another” that the self returned” (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 50). The narrative mediation of oneself
as another forms a spectre of selves. Thus Ricoeur rejects both the irrationalism of
immediate understanding and the irrationalism of wholly objective explanation and
instead proposes a dialectic of understanding and explanation in a new hermeneutic
ontology that roots understanding in the distanciation of the self from itself.
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics began with the amplifying force of interpretation as seen
in the symbols used to convey evil and fallibility, he then extended this hermeneutics to
include a dialectic between reductive and amplifying interpretations, and finally he
developed his hermeneutics through the idea of self-understanding mediated by another.
The revelation that can be illuminated in a conflict of interpretations requires more than
just the symbol and its interpretations. Whether symbols are traditional (myths and
rituals) or personal (dreams and symptoms), a reductive/productive conflict of meanings
is experienced in a living context of something else, a context that embodies and works
43
out the conflict in a world and way of life. Thus, the course of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic
philosophy develops from a focus on the phenomenon of symbols to the function of
narrative and the ontological practices of understanding the self.
From Phenomenological, Existential, Structural to Hermeneutic Psychology
The pronounced influence of the philosophy of language on Ricoeur’s work
parallels a general shift in the intellectual scene in France that happened at the time of
the post-phenomenological 1960’s. This period was marked by something of a
competition between structuralism and phenomenology as structuralism began to replace
phenomenology as the new major trend in philosophy. “This new model of
philosophizing”, Ricoeur (1973) explains, “came from linguistics; more precisely it was
an effort to extend to semantics and to all semiological disciplines the model which had
succeeded in phonology” (p. 92). Ricoeur’s contribution was to concede a place for
structuralism albeit delimited. He explains that when language is considered a system
before being an event, a system established at a more fundamental level than the
speakers’ consciousness, the primacy of subjectivity is displaced in favour of this system.
Ricoeur retains in his own philosophy something of the displacement of the subject’s
intention and meaning inherent in semiotic structure, but he leaves behind the
structuralist notion of language as a closed system of signs wherein each element gains
significance solely by reference to another element. Ultimately, Ricoeur comes down
squarely on the side of hermeneutic phenomenology where the attempt is to go beyond
the debate over the primacy of sense or reference, to what the symbol, text, or action says
about the world, about the intentions of the author, and about the reader who interprets.
44
He writes, “I was always very careful to dissociate structuralism as a universal model of
explanation from the legitimate and fruitful structural analyses as they were applied in
specific cases to a well-defined field of experience” (Ricoeur, 1995, p. 19). Although
Ricoeur sees a role for structuralism, he does not consider any structure as having
universal application. He sees, instead, a fruitful dialectic between structuralism and
hermeneutics wherein language constitutes meaning not only in a world for itself, but
also in an external world for another. Thus, Ricoeur works out the connections between
the subjective intention and the objective requirement of meaning.
Ricoeur confesses having a personal commitment to hermeneutics, but he also
maintains that “we cannot imagine modern hermeneutics - I mean post-Heideggerian
hermeneutics - without the transition through phenomenology…It is a structural
connection in the history of modern thought that the kind of hermeneutics that we know,
which is not that of Dilthey and still less that of Schleiermacher, had to be preceded by
phenomenology” (Reagan, 1996, p. 104). Neither the phenomenological nor the
hermeneutic is left aside in Ricoeur’s consideration. A hermeneutic phenomenology is
not founded on “the ‘lived’ to which we adhere purely and simply” rather life is
continually interrupted and signified in an act of distanciation. This modern style
hermeneutics is not only history and the transmission of tradition, but a lived belonging
to an inheritance continually interrupted by its being signified. Ricoeur (1995) writes, “I
consider phenomenology to be the unsurpassable presupposition of hermeneutics, to the
extent that for phenomenology every question concerning any being whatsoever is a
question about the sense of that being” (p. 36). By interfacing, instead of opposing
45
description and meaningful being, Ricoeur emphasizes the participatory ontology that
prefigures relations of understanding.
Ricoeur chooses not to follow Dilthey’s early hermeneutics, which opposes
Naturwissenschaften and Geistesswissenschaften because he is doubtful of the deep
chasm between the science of nature and the spirit of human nature that this division
implies. He throws the notion of “fact” into question by arguing that not only is there
explanation in the natural sciences and interpretation in the humanities, but there is also
interpretation in the natural sciences and explanation in the sciences of the human spirit.
Thus the division of explanation and understanding does not coincide perfectly with the
division between the natural and human sciences. Ricoeur, however, does seem to follow
Dilthey’s later hermeneutic notion that a text is fixed, independent of its original
audience and independent of the actual situation of speaking. It lies open to interpretation
beyond any psychological reconstruction of the intention of the author. Explanations and
descriptions are mute until read and through their communication they express ways of
living and being in the world. Under the influence of structuralism, hermeneutics shifts
from its romantic focus on the intersubjective relation between the subjectivity of the
author and the subjectivity of the reader, to a more objective focus on the intersection of
two worlds of meaning; that is, the world of the text and the world of the interpretation.
Ricoeur (1973) writes:
This connection means that what has to be interpreted in a text is what it says and
what it speaks about, i.e., the kind of world which it opens up or discloses; and the
final act of “appropriation” is less the projection of one’s own prejudices into the
46
text than the “fusion of horizons” - to speak like Hans-Georg Gadamer - which
occurs when the world of the reader and the world of the text merge into one
another. (p. 93)
Ricoeur’s philosophy is not a philosophy of the immediate, but a philosophy of
time and narration. The Cartesian “I am” is always mediated by the otherness of ideas,
actions, and works. Awareness of the presence of what is is revealed in time. Narrative
does not simply mirror existence rather understanding reinterprets history. The concept
of unmediated and direct intelligibility is debunked as historical consciousness in that
meaning is revealed though the narrative function of otherness. When Ricoeur translated
Husserl’s Ideas during his captivity in the Second World War he developed an idea of
human consciousness as saturated with the paradox of intentional phenomenology. He
investigated consciousness by focusing on the objects at which consciousness aims,
rather than attempting to focus directly on the elusive consciousness that aims at the
object. Phenomenologically the origin and the purpose of consciousness are indefinite
because interpretations deal with an immediateness forever out of reach. As such,
understanding is a continuous process of interpretation and communication.
Understanding does not rest but continually unfolds in an advancing motion of
description, interpretation, and appropriation. In this way Ricoeur explicates the doubly
productive nature of representation.
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CHAPTER TWO: RICOEURIAN HERMENEUTICS
Introduction to Hermeneutics
Besides Ricoeur, hermeneutics in its modern incarnation is populated by such
figures as Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Habermas. In this chapter I
will explore Ricoeur’s account of the hermeneutic work of these philosophers as they
puzzles over the questions of understanding. This will illustrate how Ricoeur places
himself within the contemporary hermeneutic tradition. Following this historical
exposition I will consider the elements of a specifically Ricoeurian hermeneutics. To
begin I will briefly consider hermeneutic issues prior to the modern era.
Hermeneutics is concerned with problems of interpretation. The term
hermeneutics derives from the Greek hermeneuein meaning to make something
understandable, to interpret, translate, express, or explain. The concept takes its name
from the ancient Greek character Hermes, messenger of the gods, the one who protects
thieves, travelers, and merchants. The historical figure of ancient Egypt Hermes
Trismegistus was said to have written Hermetic Texts that contained cryptic messages
that needed to be deciphered in order to reveal their meaning. Hermeneutic scholars
debated correct interpretation but also whether texts could be interpreted allegorically
with meanings beyond the literal (Burns, 1992).
Reflections on interpretation are recorded to have begun as early as 70 C.E. in the
Hebrew tradition (Scholem, 1965). By the 4th century C.E. theologians began to
anticipate 20th century hermeneutic concerns regarding the intent of the reader and not
just the writer of the text. Rabbinical hermeneutic scholarship recognized how
48
interpretation was not only a matter of understanding the text and mind of the writer, but
was also a matter of understanding the situation of the interpreter. From ancient times
until the late Middle Ages interpreting a text literally and only literally was considered as
doing violence to the richness of its intended meaning (Bakan, 1958). Literal, moral,
allegorical, and eschatological interpretations were seen to form a fabric of meaning for
the text. However, by the time of the Protestant movement of the 16 th century
hermeneutics took on a more stark and severe aspect. The goal of interpretation was to
ascertain the single true sense of the text and hermeneutic studies developed into the
disciplines of philology and exegesis (Thiselton, 1992). From ancient times to the 1800’s
philosophy played a minimal role in defining the concerns of hermeneutic scholarship. It
was not until the work of Friederic Schleiermacher that hermeneutics extended its
application to texts in the fields of theology, philology, and jurisprudence into philosophy
and literature.
Ihde (1995) notes that in comparison to modern philosophy’s arrival in the 17 th
and 18th centuries modern hermeneutics arrived late on the scene in the 19 th and 20th
centuries. Unlike the traditional hermeneutic focus on linguistics, exegesis, and philology
modern hermeneutics expands from methods and theories of interpreting texts to the
interpretation of entire social, historical, and psychological worlds. Scholars recognized
that meanings, both literal and allegorical, could be read not just in texts, but also in
social action and, indeed, all of existence. Faced with explaining and understanding the
general phenomenon of understanding modern hermeneutics shifts focus away from
discerning correct interpretations and hidden meaning and takes up phenomenology,
49
existentialism, and ontology as ways of understanding. At the centre of a modern
hermeneutics is thus the understanding of understanding. One of the central puzzles of
this work involves theorizing how correct meanings are understood when the symbolic
nature of representation makes different meanings possible (Ricoeur, 1981). The most
recent developments in hermeneutics involve expanding the notion of “text” to include a
greater diversity of mediums. Post-modern hermeneutics considers texts, monuments,
documents, or any event that is representational in the sense of being able to stand
independent from its author as having the puzzling ability to convey a plurality of
meaning without conveying everything or anything at all.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
It is common to mark the beginning of modern hermeneutics in the early 19 th
century with the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher was a
German theologian known for his contributions to the founding of modern Protestant
thought, but he is also renowned as a seminal figure contributing to the transition of
hermeneutics into the modern era. Schleiermacher articulated possibilities of
interpretation wherein texts could be interpreted grammatically, psychologically,
comparatively, and intuitively. In response to the Enlightenment emphasis on abstract
knowledge and pure reason, Schleiermacher sought to develop a theory of interpretation
that could account for contextual understanding. He saw hermeneutics as involving three
related issues: the possibility of divining meaning without losing access to critical appeal;
the hermeneutic circle and the back and forth process of understanding parts of a text
related to a rough anticipation of the whole of the text while understanding the whole
50
depends on provisional understanding of the parts; and third, interpretation as linked to
understanding that comes both before and after as understanding generates an ability to
anticipate, ask questions, and better understand (Thiselton, 1992). It was this work of
developing a general philosophy of interpretation that removed hermeneutics from the
exclusive domain of theology, philology, and jurisprudence and brought it into the
modern era of understanding how and when things are meaningful.
Ricoeur (1981) sees in Schleiermacher’s work two salient issues of interpretation
and understanding that continue throughout contemporary philosophical hermeneutics.
First, interpretation raises questions about the possibility of correct meaning and the
validity of understanding. Second, interpretation is innovative and can provide better
knowledge of the authors’ messages than they can provide themselves. In the first case,
conventions form a common ground for the audience to understand the author, so
hermeneutics must concern itself with contextual conventions used to convey and
understand the message. Grammatical and comparative interpretations are salient in this
form of analysis. A second aspect of a hermeneutics is concerned with the author’s
particular message and creative genius. In this case psychological and intuitive
interpretations are prominent. Schleiermacher highlights how each aspect of
interpretation requires independent analysis. Although the genius and the context of a
message can be contrasted, focus on one occludes focusing on the other. Linguistic
considerations cannot be at the fore when considering the message of the individual
author and the genius of the author cannot be the focus of analysis when considering
linguistic and cultural determinants of meaning. Within each realm of interpretation we
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are involved in a hermeneutic circle such that total understanding is continually
postponed. A correct reading is not possible without knowing about the author, but we
come to know about the author by reading the text. We gain a rough understanding of the
part, which informs our understanding of the whole. This in turn puts us in a better
position to ask appropriate questions and to better understand the part. In this way,
hermeneutics is not about complete understanding or final meaning.
Wilhelm Dilthey
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), a German philosopher of the late 19th early 20th
century, is another seminal figure in the history of hermeneutics. Ricoeur (1981) felt it
important to know that Dilthey’s philosophy transpired in an intellectual climate that
claimed to explain history scientifically with the atomistic entities and mechanistic laws
of the natural sciences. Dilthey objected to this naturalistic reduction of human history.
Methods in the natural sciences do not have a monopoly on knowing and should not
dismiss questions of meaning and purpose from the understanding of human history.
Dilthey proposed that the epistemology of the natural sciences provided abstract
intelligibility that was removed from the felt experience of life. Although such an
approach might be useful to explain natural phenomena, he argued that modern natural
science was an inappropriate model for the human sciences. Dilthey (1976) developed a
theory of understanding based in self-reflection that established knowledge claims in the
human sciences independent of the methodology of the natural sciences; yet, still be
respected by the scientific community. Instead of bracketing ordinary life and experience
and abstracting isolated facts from a complex whole, he saw the method of the human
52
sciences as the analysis of parts without alienating the whole of human historical
involvement from the knowing of that part.
Dilthey is renowned for the philosophical distinction he made between the natural
and human sciences. He proposed that the natural sciences provided mechanistic
explanations of phenomena, but the human sciences dealt with historical knowledge that
had to be understood. Ricoeur terms this difference between the explanation of nature
and the understanding of history as a “great opposition” (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 49) and a
“ruinous dichotomy” (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 92). Dilthey conceded that sometimes
understanding and explanation converge, but ultimately he determined that the two
approaches were so different that they could not be synthesized. Ricoeur (1981) always
the proponent of a dialectical position laments that, “the opposition is heavy with
consequences for hermeneutics, which is thereby severed from naturalistic explanation
and thrown back into the sphere of psychological intuition” (p. 49). Although Ricoeur
would not follow Dilthey into an endorsement of unmediated reflexive awareness, the
static arrangement of the explanation/understanding dichotomy was refined into a more
productive movement between explanation and understanding in both Ricoeur’s
philosophy and in the later works of Dilthey.
For Dilthey, the distinctive feature of understanding in the human sciences is its
reliance on psychology and hermeneutics. The ability to understand humans acting,
willing, taking initiative, trying to understand and communicating in society is founded in
the psychological ability to access another mind. Things can be explained, but humans
must be understood. Knowing a mental world is distinct from knowing a physical world
53
because interpersonal understanding involves interpreting manifestations of human
thought across shared historical experiences. Expressions of another human life are
understood from the position of one’s own being. Life and the expressions of living are
externalized and these objectifications are understood by other lives because they also
live within a history of expression. A hermeneutics strives to interpret the signs of mental
life by way of this interconnection. Understanding is thus the ability to transpose oneself
into another not by empathizing, but by way of an historical connection.
Ricoeur (1981) celebrates Dilthey’s work when he writes how he “brings to light
the central aporia of a hermeneutics which subsumes the understanding of texts to the
law of understanding another person who expresses himself therein” (p. 52). In this way,
Dilthey extends the problem of understanding texts to the problem of understanding all
human acts including the interpretation of human life in history and makes this problem a
problem of knowing others. The central question of hermeneutics shifts from
understanding what is being said to understanding who is saying it and when it is
meaningful. At this point modern hermeneutic scholarship is developing two notable
characteristics. First, hermeneutics focuses on objective expressions of mental life and
the historical meaning of lived experience. Secondly, hermeneutics is an attempt to
formulate ways of knowing distinct from the methods of the natural sciences.
Martin Heidegger
It was Martin Heidegger (1899-1976), a German philosopher known for his work
in existential phenomenology and for his significant contributions to developments in
modern hermeneutics, who questioned the assumption that hermeneutics was any form of
54
method or knowing at all. For Heidegger (1927/1962), a hermeneutics is not an
epistemology or a matter of adding cultural, historical, or psychological dimensions to a
theory of knowledge. Hermeneutical understanding is not knowledge of something;
rather it is “pre-prepositional” and involves being thrown into a world of possibilities and
purposes. For Heidegger a human being is a being that understands. To be human is to
reflexively understand a world. Being in the world makes things become meaningfully
present. Possibilities of meaning are anticipated and this anticipation signifies, not only a
historical continuity, but also a field of absence. Heidegger strives to acknowledge this
absence that presents being.
In Heidegger’s hermeneutics, Husserl’s (1938/1970) phenomenological
conception of everyday life, life that is unreflectively accepted as the world, forms the
ontological basis for understanding. Heidegger positions understanding within everyday
ways of being in the world. In ordinary German, Dasein simply means existence in space
and time as opposed to not existing, but Heidegger uses Dasein technically to mean the
disclosing of meaning in existence. Being in the world discloses the incomplete but
meaningful presence of itself and of others. Understanding is an ontological process not a
method of interpretation. To be human is to understand meaning in existence. Heidegger,
like the other modern hermeneuts, endorses the hermeneutic circle; all efforts at
understanding derive from an existential understanding of the being of things, which
circles back into the knowledge of everyday life. Understanding is already embedded, as
it becomes embedded, in the being that we are in the world. For Heidegger the
hermeneutic task is not to get outside the circle to gain more objective understanding, but
55
to become properly located within the circle one exists within (Bleicher, 1980) and this
means becoming more conscious of our hermeneutic situation.
Heidegger appreciates that the understanding of being originates from practical
experience, but this understanding is not knowledge of some thing. Knowledge is derived
from experiencing our anticipations, interests, dynamic relations, purposes, and
possibilities. Instead of a knowing subject, there is a subject who inhabits a world.
Interpretation does not increase knowledge, but makes being come into itself more fully
as being. Ricoeur (1981) characterizes Heidegger’s work as an account of being
encountering being without becoming an object faced by a subject (p. 54). Understanding
is not knowledge of this or that fact, but the movement of being into its possibilities. The
epistemological dichotomy of explanation and understanding is subordinated to ontology
and all knowledge becomes a condition of existing and inhabiting a world. Heidegger’s
concept of Dasein, the continual disclosure of meaningful being, has no place for the
relationship of subject to object. Concern shifts from the being that is with what is known
to being within what is known. The being that always already understands being negates
the realm of knowing. Knowing is simply part of one’s being and understanding in the
world. As being is the foundation for knowing, there is no room for method because one
cannot make a method out of the authenticity of being. Instead of the epistemological
opposition between explanation and understanding, Heidegger absorbs all of
epistemology within ontology and focuses on the being that precedes knowledge.
Heidegger felt that questions of knowing and method would have to be recast as
questions of being in the world. Ricoeur (1981) summarizes, “Hermeneutics is not a
56
reflection on the human sciences, but an explication of the ontological ground upon
which these sciences can be constructed” (p. 55). Understanding is not a problem of
communication, but a problem of being in the world, of one’s positions in the world, and
one’s being within being. Heidegger does not ask what can be understood, but what kind
of being exists whose being is constituted by way of understanding. Ricoeur (1981) sees
this shift in focus as successfully de-psychologising understanding (p. 56). Understanding
is not about a subject that knows; instead of subjectivity there is being continually in the
process of understanding. A Heideggerian hermeneutics, therefore, is a matter of
interrogating being and not subjectivity or procedures of knowing.
Ricoeur refuses to fully subordinate epistemology to ontology in the manner of
Heidegger and instead maintains the dialectic tension between being and knowing. He
finds that Heidegger’s ontological foundation of knowledge precludes inquiry into the
status of knowledge and the validity of understanding. Ricoeur sees Heidegger as having
irrevocably severed communication with the sciences making it impossible to evaluate
even Heidegger’s own claim that interpretation is derivative of being. In short, Ricoeur
objects that Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics prevents epistemology. Ricoeur (1981)
explains,
With Heidegger’s philosophy, we are always engaged in going back to the
foundations, but we are incapable of beginning the movement of return which would
lead from the fundamental ontology to the properly epistemological question of the
status of the human sciences…For me, the question which remains unresolved in
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Heidegger’s work is this: how can a question of critique in general be accounted for
within the framework of a fundamental hermeneutics? (p. 59)
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Ricoeur was significantly influenced by Heideggerian hermeneutics through what
he terms Gadamer’s (1900-2002) brilliant renovation of Heidegger (Ricoeur, 1985, p.
22). Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927/1962) and Gadamer’s Truth and Method
(1960/1998) are recognized as two of the most important contributions to hermeneutics
in the 20th century. They can both be considered reactions to Kantian and neo-Kantian
subjectivism and tendencies to abstract things from their original concrete historical
situations. In 1923 Gadamer studied phenomenology with both Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger. He continued as a student of Heidegger’s until 1929, two years after
the publication of Being and Time. Gadamer developed a philosophical hermeneutics
that carried on the Heideggerian tradition of a phenomenological hermeneutics
concerned with ontology and not methodology or theories of knowledge. Since the
publication of Gadamer’s work Truth and Method (1960/1998), hermeneutics has had a
pervasive influence throughout the social sciences, raising questions about the scientific
status of the social sciences, the nature of objectivity, the relationship between the
knower and the known, and the dialogical constitution of meaning (Bleicher, 1980).
Gadamer, following Heidegger, poses the problem of understanding as a problem
of how one is situated in the world. Gadamer argues that understanding is an experience
that is undergone, an event that cannot be objectively verified or reliably replicated.
Understanding, insofar as it is our being in the world, happens to us in a way that is
58
beyond our wanting or doing anything. For Gadamer (1927/1962) this event structure of
truth is a universal characteristic of understanding. Gadamer goes on to extend
Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein by reflecting on how one’s place in the world fuses the
horizon of one’s past understanding with that of the present horizon of understanding.
The past is a horizon of prejudice, a pre-understanding that becomes clarified in its
convergence with the horizon of the present. There is no unmediated point from which to
begin understanding, it is the prejudice of pre-understanding that enables further
understanding. While the present holds the freshness of the unknown, meaning arises
through dialogue across differences of past and present. In this way, Heidegger’s concept
of Dasein comes to include the relationship between different positions of beings within
the world. Gadamer also takes up Heidegger’s awareness of the absence out of which
being emerges and into which it also returns. For Gadamer, this absence is recast as
tradition. Tradition conceals resources within it as it perpetually yields material for
significance.
Ricoeur understands Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as a confrontation of
Heideggerian truth and Diltheyan method. He sees Gadamer as seriously concerned with
Dilthey’s questioning of the foundation of the human sciences (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 60). For
Gadamer, understanding belongs to the encounter with the thing known and not only to
being within what is understood. Gadamer’s hermeneutics retains a place from which to
evaluate operative assumptions and the foundations of knowledge claims. As he reworks
positivistic forms of knowledge he comes to understand the foundation of the human
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sciences not as a methodology, but as based in one’s being in history and the
development of an historical consciousness.
Ricoeur and Gadamer
Ricoeur’s hermeneutic position affirms many assertions made by Gadamer. In his
intellectual autobiography, Ricoeur (1995) concedes that Gadamer’s work Truth and
Method (1960/1998) was a “privileged reference” in developing his own hermeneutic
position (p. 22). Without making a hasty synthesis of Ricoeur and Gadamer, areas of
convergence and divergence should be distinguished. For both Gadamer and Ricoeur
understanding is an experience, not something performed by a subject but an event that is
undergone. Both hermeneuts focus on what is happening when we understand and not on
what it is that we understand. Reflecting on such understanding we can realize the
positions that we exist within, the edges of our knowledge, and other possibilities of
being in the world. Ricoeur takes up Gadamer’s idea that authority need not be
irrevocably linked to domination. Both propose that authority can be based in
appreciation of limits and the acceptance of others having better understanding. The
situatedness at the heart of understanding makes understanding both part of one’s being
in the world, while also referring to something other than one’s being, something that is
absent. This style of authority relies on recognition and results in acknowledgment of
authority instead of obedience to authority. Ricoeur also follows Gadamer in
emphasizing the linguistic nature of all understanding. They both maintain that language
discloses the worlds we move within. Language is not a tool of thought, but woven into
the very fabric of understanding. They value the infinity of significance without
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eschewing the finitude of ontology as they balance between the poles of nothingness and
anythingness of meaning.
Ricoeur also joins Gadamer by including a notion of pre-understanding9 or
prejudice in a hermeneutics. When understanding involves being historically situated in
an active tradition, a theory of understanding must recognize prejudice as a necessary
condition for the possibility of understanding. Prejudice connects knowledge to the
conditions of existence, to a world that precedes understanding and envelopes
consciousness. To be free from prejudice is impossible for a being who’s understanding
is integral to its existing. However, prejudice can only be known by way of its
confronting another point of view. Ricoeur and Gadamer both argue that understanding
happens dialogically across different positions, that understanding has a creative
dimension offering possibilities for gaining greater presence as differences of knowledge
work to converge. The finitude of what is near, the limits of understanding, and
historically positioned consciousness can release to an infinitude of distant awareness.
The play of understanding and knowledge alternates through time by way of dialogue
across difference. There is no communication without the restricting limitations of a
dialectic tension, a difference of horizon, a conflict of interpretation.
There is a distance between knowing of and belonging to understanding. Both
Ricoeur and Gadamer struggle to articulate this play of nearness and distance in the
Ricoeur’s notion of pre-understanding is subtly different from Gadamer’s notion of prejudice or
Habermas’ notion of interest. For Ricoeur, pre-understanding is a mode of being and not just a
place of belonging. Pre-understanding involves more than the context in which we understand
and includes an active sense of hope and a living depth of faith.
9
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process of understanding. They both reject an absolute position of distance that would
thoroughly objectify participation in being. They agree that one cannot be objective in the
sense of leaving one’s view and gaining objectivity by forgetting oneself; but also
maintain that a hermeneutics is not so unique that it does not access what is other than
itself. Both hermeneuts take seriously the possibility of hearing something from another
and telling something to another. They reject a radically contextualized perspective that
would disallow the possibility of taking another point of view or placing oneself in
another tradition. These actions link prior understanding with the present unknown. A
dialectic tension between the points of view of self and other form the conditions
necessary for understanding existence.
Once knowing and understanding are functions of one’s being, the evaluation of
knowing becomes problematic. There is no position between knowing and being from
which to evaluate truth. In Truth and Method (1960/1998) Gadamer takes up the puzzling
relationships of being and ways of knowing. He ponders over the distance required of
scientific methods of knowing and yet the ontological belonging necessary for
understanding. Ricoeur (1981) writes, “The methodology of these sciences ineluctably
implies, in Gadamer’s eyes, a distancing, which in turn expresses the destruction of the
primordial relation of belonging” (p. 60). This distance presupposed in scientific methods
of knowing precludes understanding because it destroys the fundamental relation of
belonging to the world. The problem is that the known cannot be extracted from the
process of being; therefore, scientific forms of knowing cannot be valid understandings.
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Gadamer develops hermeneutics into a critique of all methods of knowing
including the method of critique. Ricoeur agrees with Gadamer that hermeneutics
provides a strong position from which to deconstruct critique, and both also see the task
of hermeneutics as one of reconnecting knowledge and technology to worlds and ways of
being. In demonstrating how knowledge does not stand outside of life, hermeneutics
revitalizes technology. But the process of understanding method, technique, and
knowledge as ways of living and being in a world is never-ending. Ricoeur (1981) writes,
“The struggle against methodological distanciation transforms hermeneutics into a
critique of critique; it must always push the rock of Sisyphus up again, restore the
ontological ground that methodology has eroded away” (p. 77). The project of
understanding is never complete because consciousness cannot be objectified at the same
time that it acts upon us. Methodology diminishes the being of existence when it reduces
being to a procedure and being diminishes method when it takes up method only as a way
of being. Methodology is a threat to ontology just as ontology threatens methodology, but
for Ricoeur a hermeneutics can traverse the abyss between them. The opposition then reemerges as an exchange. The truth of method finds its possibility within the structure of
being and being manifests its possibility in the structure of method.
Ricoeur’s Distance from Gadamer
For both Gadamer and Ricoeur hermeneutic inquiry moves from Heidegger’s
thoroughly ontological considerations back to questions of epistemology. However,
Gadamer remains within Heidegger’s fundamental position of the belonging of
understanding, Ricoeur extends Gadamer’s position by taking seriously the puzzling
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possibility of being critically conscious of one’s belonging without lapsing into an
alienating distance from that belonging. Ricoeur (1981) asks, “how is it possible to
introduce a critical instance into a consciousness of belonging which is expressly defined
by the rejection of distanciation?” (p. 61). Unlike Gadamer, Ricoeur does not reject the
notion of distanciation, but assumes distanciation as a part of one’s belonging to a world.
The tension between detachment and belonging is essential to consciousness. Instead of
an opposition between one’s inclusion in the world and objectification of that inclusion,
Ricoeur sets up a dialectical tension by theorizing objectification as an aspect of
belonging. He (1981) writes, “There is thus a paradox of otherness, a tension between
proximity and distance, which is essential to historical consciousness” (p. 61).
Ricoeur sees this dialectic of participation and distanciation in Gadamer’s own
philosophy of the fusion of horizons. Understanding does not enclose us in a point of
view, but intersects different views. The horizon is not an end, not closed or total, rather
it encapsulates the tension between what is known and what is alien. Thus Ricoeur
(1981) writes, “the play of difference is included in the process of convergence” (p. 62).
This fusion of difference includes the differences between a hermeneutics and a critical
stance toward a hermeneutics. Understanding can fuse with a knowing of one’s
understanding. In this way Ricoeur’s position is more receptive to a critique of
understanding as ideology. Refusing to acquiesce to a static embeddedness in tradition he
appreciates the alternation between the distance of critique and the nearness of a
hermeneutics and so is more positive about distanciation than is Gadamer.
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Ricoeur wishes to formulate a hermeneutics that places the deconstruction of
understanding, or critique of ideology, at the heart of a hermeneutics without then
becoming caught solely in a critical stance. Ricoeur (1981, p. 64) argues that each
position, hermeneutic and critical, makes a universal claim based in the structural
position of the other. A critique of ideology understands tradition as the consequence of
forces that systematically distort communication. Similarly, a hermeneutics situates
understanding within historical existence and sees a tradition as marking the limits of
understanding. A hermeneutics brings to light how a critique of ideology is also
contained by a historical way of understanding because the point from which a critique of
ideology proceeds is itself an ideology that must concede to finite and historical being in
the world. In this way Ricoeur envelops critique within a hermeneutic understanding. He
positions hermeneutics and critique not in conflict, but in a mutually interpenetrating
dialectic and refuses to adopt Gadamer’s position without this dialectic. He (1981)
writes, “Gadamer inevitably turned hermeneutic philosophy towards the rehabilitation of
prejudice and the defence of tradition and authority, placing this philosophy in a
conflictual relation to any critique of ideology” (p. 66). The confrontation of a
hermeneutics of tradition and the critique of ideology generates conflicts of interpretation
that Ricoeur sees launching a new phase of hermeneutics.
Jurgen Habermas
The critique of ideology that Ricoeur takes up is based in the philosophy of
Jurgen Habermas (b.1929). Habermas was a member of the Frankfurt School, which in
its earliest incarnation was concerned with incorporating research methods of social
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science into the dialectic materialism of Marxist theory. Habermas was a newer member
of the Frankfurt school and was more influenced by hermeneutics, pragmatism,
anthropology, and linguistics than its other members, but his aim was similar in that he
sought ways of integrating philosophy and method through a position of dialectical
materialism (Bleicher, 1980). In his two-volume magnum opus The Theory of
Communicative Action (1981/1984; 1981/1987) he developed a philosophy of
communication and made significant contributions to social theory. Like Heidegger,
Gadamer, and Ricoeur he appreciated human understanding as inescapably mediated by
language. He argues that understanding must be reached through language and that
linguistic intersubjectivity is at the basis of the methodology of the social sciences.
Society, therefore, is shaped not only through labour relations, but also through the
linguisticality of understanding. Thus it is not only the accumulation and trade of
technical knowledge, but also the liberation of communication that is central to the
evolution of society.
In much of Habermas’ (1968/1971; 1981/1984; 1981/1987) philosophy he
critiques both epistemology and hermeneutics by proposing that all communication is
distorted by the tacit exercise of force. Similar to Gadamer’s concept of prejudice and
Ricoeur’s notion of pre-understanding, Habermas develops the idea of interest which
entails the impossibility of situating one’s knowledge outside the influence of historical
bias and personal desire. Interest underlies all attempts at knowing, but these interests are
not explicit and only in special circumstances can they be brought to light. Narrative is
censored and distorted by the repressive presence of authority, but these distortions go
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unacknowledged by the community because they are necessary for maintaining power
and labour relations. Unlike Gadamer and Ricoeur, Habermas does not argue that
misunderstanding and disagreements can be resolved through dialogue across differing
positions, nor does Habermas assume an autonomous pre-understanding prior to
misunderstanding. Like understanding he sees pre-understanding as a tacit agreement
forming a false consciousness based in dynamics of distorted communication. Dialogue
is not considered to be sufficient to correct misunderstanding because concealed interests
will continue to distort communication. For Habermas greater understanding is not
possible through dialogue because social relations of domination and control continue to
operate through all attempts at further understanding. Not simply more communication
and less technology, but interpreting the distortions and non-sense shaping
communication is required to make sense and correct misunderstanding.
Habermas thinks that the way to emancipatory understanding resides in the
availability of unique communicative forums where people can participate in unrestricted
dialogue. He believes that by promoting circumstances where communication produces
unforced dialogue a change of oppressive traditions would be generated. Whereas
Gadamer is content to theorize understanding and the hermeneutics of being, for
Habermas, it is not enough to interpret understanding. He envisions replacing a
technocratic rationality with understanding the goals of technical skill. Habermas wants
to liberate communication from the goal of influencing others and manipulating interests.
He advocates for consensual understanding not by the use of strategic or instrumental
communication that aims at persuading another to agree, but by a cooperative process of
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interpretation that seeks a mutually shared understanding of being in the world.
Habermas uses psychoanalysis as a meta-hermeneutics to explain distortions of
communication and suggests psychoanalysis could provide greater understanding by
reflecting on and reconstructing the influence of anticipation (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 84–85).
At the Intersection of Gadamer and Habermas
Ricoeur theorizes at the intersection of a critique of ideology and a hermeneutics
of tradition. He appreciates the spirit of emancipation in a critique and the spirit of
recollection in a hermeneutic phenomenology as a mutually forming and interpenetrating
dialectic. When we are absorbed in understanding we are in a better position to critique
and when we critique we further our understanding. As we lose ourselves to the
experience of understanding a critique may not be immediately available. However, it is
not one position or the other that is valuable, but the movement between them that
generates understanding. Ricoeur agrees with Habermas that the critique of ideology does
not have enough applicability in Gadamer’s theory of interpretation. However, Ricoeur
also agrees with Gadamer that the epistemological concerns of a hermeneutics and
efforts to validate knowledge claims must be carried out within ontology. Understanding
cannot become procedure or critical reflection or a way of knowing because it is a way of
being and a way of relating to being and to beings (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 44). For Gadamer,
epistemology dissolves as it is absorbed within ontology, but Ricoeur goes further than
Gadamer in that he struggles to sustain critique by recognizing the presence of an
epistemology even though it is absorbed within ontology. Ricoeur refuses to allow
ontology to prevent a return to epistemology. Both Ricoeur and Habermas work from
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Heidegger’s position of the “being of understanding” back to questions of methodology
and critique. For Ricoeur there is no need to choose between them. He (1981) writes,
“nothing is more deceptive than the alleged antinomy between an ontology of prior
understanding and an eschatology of freedom…as if it were necessary to choose between
reminiscence and hope” (p. 100). Opportunities to interpret the past can provide
possibilities of being. As awareness is turned toward the tradition that precedes
understanding possibilities for a new understanding of life is engendered. Recognizing
the tacit consensus structured in our existence does not preclude hope but encourages a
renewal of meaning. Furthermore, critique of tradition is itself a tradition that anticipates
emancipation, hope, and redemption. Ricoeur joins the horizons of reminiscence and
hope, of hermeneutics and critique without synthesizing one with the other. He retains
the difference from which they speak so that they can continue to recognize each other
and communicate. It is exceedingly difficult to retain this tension without being tempted
to adopt and defend a single position, falling into a philosophy of right and wrong instead
of valuing the connection between.
Ricoeur suggests that Gadamer’s book might be called “Truth or Method”
because he believes that Gadamer’s ideas about understanding preclude the possibility of
a dialectical conjunction and that his hermeneutics is fundamentally dichotomous.
Gadamer dissolves the presence of distanciation and refuses to include an objectifying
distance within the process of understanding. Ricoeur acknowledges a place for critical
distance in his dialectical hermeneutics by recognizing the following four themes as
integral to the process of understanding: 1) distanciation; 2) the mutuality of explanation
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and understanding; 3) the imitative function of a hermeneutics; 4) reappropriation of the
self and self-consciousness.
Distanciation, a process that might also be called objectification, diminishes the
being of understanding. However, distanciation allows for the possibility of
understanding this being of understanding as the being of understanding; that is, it makes
it possible to know that one understands. Ricoeur is a classic hermeneut in the sense that
he prioritizes the text in hermeneutics. It is the text that provides the distanciation needed
to mediate understanding not as being, but understanding as understanding. Practices,
narratives, documents, and monuments are all what Ricoeur generally calls text (i.e. any
work that can stand autonomous from its author and create its own audience). The text is
the condition by which communication and understanding occur. For Ricoeur it is the
text and not dialogue that mediates meaning because the text can stand apart from its
intended audience and the cultural situation that produced it and still be meaningful. The
text takes on a life of its own and is understood by a variety of different readings. Ricoeur
sees this autonomy of the text as a necessary condition for interpretation and
understanding because the distance of the text from its meaning prepares a space for
critique. He (1981) writes, “The distanciation in which this hermeneutics tends to see a
sort of ontological fall from grace appears as a positive component of being for the text;
it characteristically belongs to interpretation, not as its contrary but as its condition” (p.
91). It is not that the text is the exclusive object of interpretation as much as the text is
“emancipated” as the exclusive mediator of meaning.
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The second theme highlights a place for critique in the dialectical hermeneutics
of Ricoeur as long as the dichotomy of explanation and understanding is overcome.
Ricoeur insists that a hermeneutics be constituted with explanatory descriptive structures
because these structures inaugurate possibilities of meaning. Ricoeur maintains that with
explanation we will better understanding and with understanding we can better explain.
Akin to Habermas’ notion of reconstruction, Ricoeur argues that it is the description and
explanation of the structure of a text that mediates understanding.
The third way in which a hermeneutics can include critique is through its
imitative and creative function. Interpretation joins the text with an intention. The text
reproduces and represents the world into which its audience is carried. The mode of
being toward which the text points is a possible world, a world that transgresses reality as
it imitates reality. It is because of the reading of the text that we know there is a point of
view. As the text reproduces, it implicitly critiques a world that is, defining its limits by
the way it is meaningful. The text has the power of creative redescription; it distances
itself from reality, opens possibilities of being, and aims at the power to become. Insofar
as interpretation reveals the potential of a world I could inhabit, it critiques the world I do
inhabit.
Finally, Ricoeurian hermeneutics holds a place for the critique of ideology
because a further awareness of self becomes available in the process of appropriating the
proposed worlds that interpretation offers. One can become aware of one’s false
consciousness, of one’s prejudice, and one’s interests as one confronts another world that
is appropriated upon interpreting the text. The self can thus be distanced from itself and
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reconstructed as another self. Interpretation reveals a world in which my own
possibilities unfold. In the effort to understand, a hermeneutics becomes the testament to
a self and a world.
For Ricoeur, hermeneutics is a humble enterprise that strives to acknowledge the
historical conditions that must be included in all understanding and the finitude of all
claims to knowledge. By contrast, the critique of ideology is a continual gesture that
strives to escape the limitations of human communication. He compares the
hermeneutics of tradition with a critique of ideology (1981),
By the first, I place myself in the historical process to which I know that I belong; by
the second, I oppose the present state of falsified human communication with the
idea of an essentially political freedom of speech, guided by the limiting idea of
unrestricted and unconstrained communication. (p. 87)
Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy accommodates a critical moment as part of a process
of understanding. Instead of a singular position either in epistemological questions or else
in the ontological structure of understanding, he insists on an exchange of being and
understanding. This alternating movement enables reflection on the interpreted
foundation that forms the structure of an ontological hermeneutics while also providing
the place within understanding that we incarnate through being. Ricoeur parts ways with
Gadamer in proposing that an ontological hermeneutics can return to the
phenomenological moment where the critique of pre-understanding begins. Knowing
one’s understanding does not utterly ruin the purity of being even though it may do so
temporarily. He faults Gadamer because he refuses the distance required for critique and
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perpetually abandons knowing in lieu of a renewed place of being. Ricoeur sees an
oscillation between nearness of understanding being and the distance of knowing reality.
He strives to maintain a fruitful dialectic of the being and becoming of understanding by
taking seriously both the realism of things that are known and the ways of being entailed
by any form of understanding. Whether there is a critique of ideology or a hermeneutics,
each on its own becomes only ideology.
Paul Ricoeur: Moments in the Process of Understanding
In dialogue with oneself or another, Ricoeur’s dialectical hermeneutics
continually relinquishes being to regain meaningful existence in an endless process of
discursive symbolization. Awareness is understood as a testimony to one’s being and
being as a history with an origin and an aim. Refusing to take shortcuts of any kind,
Ricoeur accepts the necessity of the hermeneutic detour and an oblique approach to
meaning. Instead of presuming direct access to understanding through the nature of our
being, Ricoeur approaches the understanding of existence indirectly as mediated through
symbols, narratives and ideologies. For the sake of exegesis, Ricoeurian hermeneutics
can be broken into three distinct moments. First there is the moment of the narration of
what is, then there is awareness of the narrative, puzzles, and conflicts of interpretation
that generate further awareness, and thirdly there is a moment of understanding and the
realization of being. Ultimately, a hermeneutics reveals and regenerates the meaning of
our world and ways of being. Ricoeurian hermeneutics is a process of grafting meaning
into the telling of stories. This process reveals how understanding is arrived at, not all at
once, but by degrees through detours of reflection (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 6). A hermeneutics
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of narration is an understanding of the interpretations we 10 make in the stories we tell of
our lives. Instead of focusing exclusively on the being who understands or the
understanding of the being, Ricoeur reflects on how phenomenology approaches
understanding through the interpretation of cultural, linguistic, and social signs. This
process of reading the meaning of one’s life in the products of one’s existence creates
and recreates meaningful existence.
In what follows, I will lay out the hermeneutic process as if awareness,
interpretation, and understanding occur in successive moments. However, it must be
remembered that each moment is contained within the others and these different aspects
of understanding are fluid and happen simultaneously. Furthermore, an analysis of
understanding can be subject to analysis ad infinitum. Explanation employs time and the
succession of events to convey meaning, but the use of time and phenomenological
description to explain the process of understanding is not to be mistaken as totalizing or
absolutely true. It is the understanding and not the approach or the narrative that is
timeless. To remain faithful to the hermeneutic philosophy of Ricoeur, an exegesis of
Ricoeurian hermeneutics must also be understood as story and recognized as having a
hermeneutics.
The Phenomenological Moment
Phenomenology is perhaps the easiest place to begin an exegesis of Ricoeurian
hermeneutics. Ricoeur’s early work translating Husserl’s Ideen I into French established
10
When using plural pronouns, I do not mean to imply all persons, at all times, in every place, but
rather the reference is limited by the Judeo-Christian lineage in which both Ricoeur and Freud
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him as a leading authority in phenomenology. However, in contrast to Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty who developed French phenomenology in an existential direction,
Ricoeur wedded phenomenology with hermeneutics. Instead of focusing exclusively on
the preconfigured meaning of existence in the world, Ricoeur highlights the presence of
interpretation in all realms of life including the realm of pre-understanding. Phenomena,
however, are not acts of interpretation; rather phenomena are already interpreted signs in
the world that carry messages revealed by way of interpretation.
In this first phenomenological moment we are absorbed in awareness. Aware
without also being aware of being aware. In the grip of awareness, we are still operating
with culturally and historically inherited understanding, but phenomenological
description (e.g. the story of what is) is not a reflection on the understanding inherent in a
description. Talk of experience is an expression of certainty about the world.
Participating in life brings forth its preconfigured significance. We inherit the already
interpreted and this makes reflection unnecessary for the world to be meaningful.
Awareness is unified with the meaning of awareness. Ricoeur (1981) writes,
“consciousness, even before its awakening as such, belongs to and depends on that which
effects it” (p. 74). Preconfigured meaning is a moment that seductively makes
consciousness appear uniform, as if there were a direct correspondence of expression
with being. In such moments, meaning is not at issue. Actions are fluid and unhindered
by the hesitation of reflection and things go on with certainty.
have roots. This investigation is limited to meaning-making within that tradition.
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In the phenomenological moment, what is understood goes without saying.
Awareness of awareness is quietly invisible in the realm of story. When we look, listen,
and tell, consciousness crystallizes an inheritance of meaning in the immediacy of being.
In this moment Ricoeur argues that the strata of meaning are sedimented in a way
absolutely irreducible to any wilful making of meaning. In the realm of the
phenomenological, interpretations are automatic, action is certain, and everything is in
accordance with a schema of inheritance. Being already thrown into a meaningful world
is distinct from the distanced awareness of this preconfigured meaning. In the first
instance, the phenomenological is not analytical.
Ricoeur concedes that narrative can say something certain about the world, but he
also tells us that this assertive core can never be apprehended simply in itself outside of
the inquiry that it engenders. He writes in Time and Narrative (1983/1984), “there is no
description without a discussion…this is why it is extremely difficult - and perhaps
impossible - to isolate a phenomenological core from the mass of argumentation” (p. 6).
Ricoeurian hermeneutics is not without phenomenology. Ricoeur insists that
phenomenology is an inescapable presupposition of hermeneutics, but there is an
inherent instability to the meaningful presence of phenomena. The immediacy of
meaning is constantly reaching beyond itself to other meanings. Proliferation of meaning
signifies the presence of phenomena, but very little can be said of phenomena qua
phenomena. We receive the phenomena of existence as meaningful, but understanding
the meaning of existence remains concealed until we interpret the signs and symbols that
reflect meaning.
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The Reflective Moment
Reflection begins with consciousness of the immediacy of awareness. Phenomena
are reflected upon and illuminate meaning from an opaque significance. The immediacy
of being is received, but all understanding of being must be mediated by reflection
allowing us to know the world in which we believe. The search for the meaning of things
both reveals and conceals being. Reflection endeavours to determine what a narrative
aims at and what moves it to aim as it does. The reception of a thing and the
determination of a thing’s meaning are correlated, but phenomenological certainty and
reflective awareness do not seamlessly correspond. Ricoeur (1960/1986) writes, “As soon
as reflection comes on the scene it sunders…for reflection is essentially dividing,
sundering. It is one thing, it says, to receive the presence of things, it is another to
determine the meaning of things” (p. 19). The meaning in awareness and the meaning of
awareness are temporally distinct. Reflection amplifies immediate awareness into a
spectre of what may have been and what might yet be. It produces a specificity of
meaning while also substantiating understanding by fleshing out the origin and intent of
immediate significance.
Perhaps it is ironic that the unity of consciousness must be analysed in its
certainty in order to be understood as meaningful, but with a hermeneutic analysis the
defeat of certainty becomes the victory of greater meaning. Ricoeurian hermeneutics
takes a thing’s meaning as determinate and yet also symbolic, continually open to
alternative significance. Exceptions, alternatives, and contradictions emerge creating
conditions for recovering greater understanding. Whereas phenomenology clarifies
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meaning, hermeneutics introduces doubt, conflict, a plurality of meaning, and the
problem of how to know and make sense out of this plurality. It is not that narrative
conceals in its opaque depth a plethora of meanings waiting to be revealed, but that
multiple meanings arise from reflection. Reflection brings forth the symbolic potentials
of language. Ricoeur (1960/1967) explains using Kant’s phrase from the Critique of
Judgment: “Symbols give rise to thought” (p. 347). Reflection disturbs consciousness
because it solicits doubt and conflict, but this does not stop understanding; rather,
uncertainty creates conditions for the possibility of greater understanding.
Language is a fulcrum of consciousness, a focus from which meaning can radiate
and make significance possible because it is not permanently fixed or inevitable. Ricoeur
(1974) writes, “All has already been said in enigma and yet … it is necessary ever to
begin again and rebegin everything in the dimension of thought” (p. 288). When
understood, descriptions have definite meaning invested with the beliefs by which we
live. Expectations, purpose, and history are all conveyed in the language used to describe.
The certainty of phenomena provides occasion for the symbol’s meaning to manifest
while potentiating other meanings. A hermeneutics of narrative shows how language can
sustain the certainty of meaning while also being mysteriously open to receive other
meanings. Ricoeur’s theory of understanding is more concerned with theorizing the one
and many of the symbolic function of language than it is with the victory of a single
meaning. His hermeneutic inquiry focuses on how designating things presupposes this
logic of multiple meaning; a logic that assumes different perceptions, but still has the
possibility of conveying understanding. The multiplicity of meaning makes
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understanding intentional and able to refer beyond what is perceived while still being
about something. Explanation does not communicate the perception, but the intention of
what is seen. The relationship between explanation and appearance is a relationship
within language and there is no meaningful access to reality outside this symbolic
function of language.
In Ricoeur’s earlier work, a hermeneutics was deemed necessary only when
language was intentionally being used to convey more than one meaning. Ricoeur
considered hermeneutics an issue only when expressions are meant to mean something
more than what was said; for example, in the cases of poetry and myth. Symbolic
narratives that required interpretation were taken as special cases of the more general
category of signification. Hermeneutics was not yet relevant to all forms of mediation.
Interpretation and understanding were problems specific to signs meant to have
“intentional texture” designating an indirect meaning through a direct literal and
immediate meaning (Ricoeur, 1965/1970, p. 12).
Later, however, in his work in psychoanalysis and narrative, Ricoeur appreciates
the problem of multiple meaning in all narrative events. How to interpret text replaces
the initial question of how to interpret symbolic, metaphorical language (Ricoeur,
1975/1978, p. 320). Language is not taken as expressing the appearance of phenomena,
because there is no external relationship between word and thing. One becomes aware of
consciousness by knowing the consciousness of conceived descriptions. As such,
narration and consciousness of narration are intimately yet tenuously connected. Because
all narrative has to have a transcendental logic of multiple meaning that permits the co-
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presence of the many and the one, the mere possibility of understanding requires a
delicate intertwining of substance and meaning, limitation and possibility. Ricoeur came
to see symbolism as co-extensive with the communicative function of language in
general because the indeterminacy of meaning is needed to determine anything at all.
The logic of a hermeneutics is neither complacent nor equivocal; rather it is
temporal as interpretation throws meaning beyond the concrete moments of experience
into displaced occasions of advancing meaning. Language both conveys and escapes the
personal perspective and carries a density of meaning realized upon reflection. A
hermeneutics of narrative does not take immediate consciousness as truth, rather truth is
taken as conveyed through narrative. Reflection throws meaning into question but is
neither subject to fallacies of ambiguity nor guilty of equivocation. Ricoeur (1965/1970)
explains, “equivocal applies only to those expressions that ought to be univocal in the
course of a single “argument” but are not” (p. 55).
The first presupposition of existence within a Ricoeurian hermeneutics is that
everything known to be meaningful must be interpreted. As reflection distances the
immediate certainty of awareness, the meaning of one moment can be seen to reside in
the meaning that follows. The symbols of the following moment, however, create a
perpetually receding horizon of interpretation. Thus narration creates an excess of
meaning that continually pushes beyond the present. Beginning within a pre-reflective
richness of meaning, reflection initiates the question of what is meant. The answer limits
the symbolic richness of narrative to a specific meaning, yet also nourishes further excess
of meaning as understanding brings new symbols to bear and the thread of continuity
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between the old and the new keeps meaning alive. Ricoeur (1987d) writes, “Symbols of
the “beginning” receive their complete meaning only from their relations to symbols of
the “end” ” (p. 310). In a recursive way meaning proceeds from the end to the beginning
and so narrative is not in external relationship to that which it symbolizes, but unified
with the emerging incarnation of meaningful phenomena.
Hermeneutic analysis excavates consciousness to aim at understanding. In its
focus on excavation, it is oriented toward what is anterior, toward what is hidden, and its
project is to bring to light what works on us but to which we are blind. As figures emerge
into awareness there is hope that something may become of their meaning.
Understanding is stretched in different directions; one focus reaches back to an origin
while another pushes forward to the promise of a future. This tension is dynamic; each
time reflection is revisited understanding shifts. As we dig into awareness our beliefs are
revealed and each belief requires, again, understanding. There is a movement to meaning
as reflection assumes and transcends what has already been reflected upon. The symbolic
dimension of language potentiates experience that would otherwise be occluded as the
symbol gives rise to thought and makes another meaning available.
Instead of searching for the solid ground on which understanding rests,
hermeneutic reflection begins with the expression of a lived position that assumes certain
desires, meanings, and values. Ricoeur writes (1974) of a hermeneutic that, “its first
problem is not how to get started but, from the midst of speech, to recollect itself” (p.
288). Hermeneutic takes all meaning as an interpretation determinable upon reflection.
Instead of searching for first or final meaning, a hermeneutics begins by unearthing
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presuppositions of expression. In time awareness that manifests in finite temporal
embodiments is recognized as interpretation. The vital tension across these interpretive
differences is the focus of the reflective moment.
Knowing that all meaning is interpreted is not to accept interpretations as the
foundation of knowledge; rather, interpretations are heuristic as meaning advances by
contested exchanges. James Edie, editor of Conflict of Interpretations, a collection of
Ricoeur’s papers on interpreting meaning, writes, “The language of giveness or even
pregiveness is heuristic. It is a means of creating a different perspective from which to
view things, a deliberate forcing of issues so that current sediments are stirred up in order
to discover other possibilities” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. xix). Ricoeur starts from the symbol, a
place within language, not to find the presuppositionless origin of thought, but rather to
include in thought its potential suppositions. Ricoeur (1978) writes, “no discourse can
claim to be free of presuppositions for the simple reason that the conceptual operation by
which a region of thought is thematized brings operative concepts into play, which
cannot themselves be thematized at the same time” (p. 257).
The hermeneutic play of meaning across time and space may be distressing for
the seeker of permanent truth. Hermeneutics ends the devotion to an indubitable ground
of certainty. What counts as fact circulates like all interpretation, having a purpose, an
aim, and an origin. With a hermeneutic phenomenology meaning is not possible without
reflection, contest, and a diversity of contingent significance. However, abandoning the
demand for a single correct reading does not mean there are no right or wrong
interpretations. Preconfigured ontology saves us from the nauseating spin of considering
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any interpretation. In the reflective moment phenomenological certainty is questioned,
assumptions, intentions, and desires are recognized because interpretations are ventured.
Reluctant to release hold of the surety of what was, Ricoeur (1971) invites us “to give
ourselves up to the wonder that puts reflection in motion” (p. 55). Suspicious of the
received meaning of immediate awareness, a renewed and more profound awareness
becomes available because the same process that unglues the surety of our world reveals
what it is that we intend.
Narratives, phenomenological expressions of awareness, do not provide
atemporal knowledge across worlds; yet, they can communicate across vast differences
of perspective. Deprived of the once and for all of phenomena, while the certainty of
being is lost to reflection, a vitality and depth of meaning may be recovered. Ricoeur
(1965/1970) explains how, “the drama of truth centres precisely around the mystery of
birth” (p. 519). Although there are times of certainty, because life and awareness of life
do not coincide, farther along we can be certain to doubt. This movement between
creates the conditions for a renewed meaning and sense of certainty. Ricoeur celebrates
the uncertainty of the reflective moment because conflicts of interpretation form dynamic
tensions of awareness heralding both desire’s expression and meaning’s emergence. The
dialectic process invokes very different kinds of awareness at different points in the
movement of meaning. Ricoeur (1974) writes of, “a kind of movement of emergence,
then of replunging: emergence into the clarity of the transcendental, replunging into the
darkness of nonknowing” (p. 308). Meaning circulates from tacit understanding to
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interpretive reflection then returning to live with invisible awareness in the fullness of
symbols.
How something is interpreted depends upon a history of presupposed meaning,
and awareness of things being interpreted shifts the presuppositions used to understand.
Different interpretations can be brought into confrontation with one another, not to
determine what is correct, but because talking through conflicts of interpretations is
central to engaging understanding. These conflicts can be arbitrated by tracing
differences back to their respective histories, showing how each expresses a mode of
existence with certain hopes and desires and each is justified within the limits of its own
ontological context. The phenomenological and the reflective moments play off each
other in a spiralling dialectical process that can cognate and re-cognate in far reaching
understanding.
In conclusion, meaning derives not from what is the case, but is produced and
abandoned according to certain ways of being within a world where desires and hopes
shape our interests. A narrative may make it seem like a solid and definitive description
of events translates into an equally definitive meaning of events. However,
deconstructing understanding demonstrates how options of interpretation are available
and how different meanings may be possible. The negotiation of interpretation and
exposure to alternatives begins and ends with questioning the truthfulness of beliefs and
understandings. Discourse potentiates and negates possible worlds as different
interpretations make different experiences accessible. From one perspective
hermeneutics promotes limitless possibilities of meaning in indefinite matrices of
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discourse; yet reality is not doubted in the sense that anything becomes possible in every
instance. A hermeneutics of narration determines what is a priori phenomenologically,
and distinguishes the immediacy of consciousness from the delayed awareness gained
upon reflection. There can be no final overview, or absolute knowledge, because of the
continual movement of consciousness. However, neither is there strictly relative
knowledge because the reflective moment is always joined to a phenomenological
moment.
The Revelatory Moment: Appropriation
Ricoeurian hermeneutics is not exclusively concerned with what is understood
and the process of communicating understanding. It is also concerned with “the being
asking to be said” and the self-appropriation11 of that saying. From the vantage of a
hermeneutics, expressing anything also expresses something of our selves, something of
what we desire and hope. Unaware of what we mean until it is signified, a hermeneutics
of narrative conceals and, upon reflection, reveals conflicting desires, hopes and dreams.
Narrative is a testament to existence. A hermeneutics of narrative struggles to recognize
both the subject that expresses and the multiplicity of objects to which the expression
intends to refer. Ricoeur (1974) writes, “This coherent figure of the being which we
ourselves are, in which rival interpretations are implanted, is given nowhere but in this
dialectic of interpretations” (p. 23).
Ricoeur (1981) defines appropriation as follows: “ ‘Appropriation’ is my translation of the
German term Aneignung. Aneignung means ‘to make one’s own’ what was initially ‘alien’ ” (p.
185).
11
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At some point the tension of interpretations returns one to the simple act of being
aware without being aware of awareness. Then a more robust sense of being may be
appropriated. Revealing and divesting the self without end, subjectivity is recognized in
the answers given to the original problem of understanding. Hermeneutics can return one
to the immediacy of being without always having to proselytize one’s self or one’s
beliefs. Ricoeur (1970) writes, “The return to the simple attitude of listening to symbols
is the “reward consequent upon thought” ” (p. 495). Listening to what is there by hearing
what is said enables us to re-appropriate our being as we recognize what was opaque to
another self. Interpretation thus provides an awareness of the self as subjectivity opens up
to what interpretation discloses (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 498). In this way, understanding is
central to the movement of existence; as new interpretations appear through reflection
they are appropriated as testaments to being.
In the final aspect of the hermeneutic process, the reappropriation of being is not,
in Ricoeur’s vision, a project of domination. Ricoeur finds in reading one meaning
through another the ability to recognize and communicate existence (Ricoeur, 1974, p.
192). Ricoeur (1970) writes about how “reflection is the appropriation of our effort to
exist and of our desire to be, through works which bear witness to that effort and desire”
(p. 46). The liberty to know oneself resides in the ability to listen to conflicting
interpretations and therein to find the ability to accept the limitations that define one’s
being without dissolving the effort to announce one’s existence. “Liberty,” Ricoeur
writes, “considered from the point of view of last things, is not the power of hesitating
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and choosing between contraries, nor is it effort, good will, responsibility. For St. Paul, as
for Hegel, it is being at home with oneself” (Ricoeur, 1960/1967, p. 148).
In a hermeneutic circle, reflection appropriates being by making available an
understanding of what one’s being means. Ironically, this renewed awareness of being
requires relinquishing the self. Without distancing the self, interpretations are invented
instead of revealed and narcissistic pretence takes hold instead of the fluidity of
subjectivity. Ricoeur (1981) writes, “To understand is not to project oneself into the text;
it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the
genuine objects of interpretation” (p. 182-3). In determining meaning, Ricoeur is
concerned that we are not merely encapsulating a world, but rather opening possibilities
onto a world. A dialectical hermeneutics that destabilizes the old in order to receive a
new vitality runs the risk of becoming uprooted and lost, but without divesting itself it
may become overburdened by the weight of previous determinations. When a
hermeneutics becomes overburdened with interpretation it is uprooted from ontology.
Old meaning becomes encrusted with new interpretations, instead of being a forum for
the generation of new meaning12. Understanding in the final stage of Ricoeur’s
hermeneutics dispossesses the self of knowledge and reconstitutes understanding through
reflection on being aware. To appropriate meaning to the point of new understanding is
to have an epiphany that moves one into an existential moment previously unavailable.
A hermeneutics of narrative works out how interpretations are both temporary
and yet certain. Focused on the process of understanding, the risk is that symbols
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heuristically used to convey meaning may be mistaken as being what they convey.
Concerned, interested, passionate statements reflecting the value of symbolic acts are
known as such upon reflection. Interpretation is emptied of such invested meaning and
slips into revolving allegory unless the question is posed: What does this mean for me?
Do I believe that? (Ricoeur, 1960/1967, p. 354). A personal investment takes a stand and
does not merely pass from one symbol to another, encouraging not just curiosity, but
concern. Ricoeur explains how we, “become implicated in the life of one symbol, one
myth” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 298). Attachment to an interpretation, however, risks becoming
dogmatic and stale. Ricoeur warns of thick, solidified and idolized discourses (Ricoeur,
1974, p. 293). The more we understand an interpretation, the more atemporal its truth
becomes and the greater risk for that truth to occlude alternate reflections. When
narratives are no longer seen as open to interpretation they lose their potency to provide
new understanding and may instead become oppressively monotonous. Clinging to the
right interpretation kills the living movement of meaning to which the symbol gives rise.
The meaning of a narrative is diminished when it stops being symbolic, or as Ricoeur
says when “it stops playing on several registers” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 309). Yet the irony is
that the meaning of a narrative must be unequivocal at some point for coherent
communication to occur, for a single vector of meaning to be conveyed with certainty.
Stagnation or vicious circularity is a threat to understanding yet this risk makes possible
the vitality of meaning.
12
There is an old adage that says of hermeneutics it is a philosophy of new wine in old bottles.
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This risk may not seem as dire if we consider that on the one hand interpretation
always takes a form that is symbolic by inviting thought which gives rise to new
meaning. On the other hand, new meaning is more than allegory because what one
understands cannot help but come to be demonstrated in one’s actions. The language we
use to express what we see is not randomly multivocal. It is coextensive with our living
and being in the world. With enough time, the tension between the freedom of meaning
and the compulsion to act creates the conditions for meaning to proceed. A hermeneutics
of narrative demonstrates awareness that interpretations are interpretations yet they are
not whimsical because they are tied to a way of being.
Understanding continuously reveals the one who claims to understand because
reflection’s sundering of awareness illuminates the specificity of the being to which the
thing appears. Ricoeur proposes that subjectivity is gained and regained by recognition of
one’s deeds. Instead of the phenomenological focus on what appears, the reflective focus
is, to who it appears. What announcement is being made? What being is achieved?
Phenomena, when reflected upon, reveal a texture of intention and a perspective that
informs the looking while also being informative of the looker. Ricoeur (1974) writes,
The first truth - I think, I am - remains as abstract and empty as it is unassailable. It
must be mediated by representations, actions, works, institutions, and monuments
which objectify it; it is in these objects, in the largest sense of the word, that the ego
must both lose itself and find itself. (p. 327)
Ricoeur finds that the self is not verified or deduced but recognized in actions that
reflect a localized effort and desire to exist. He explains that a self must be apprehended
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in this way because “it is given neither in psychological evidence, nor in intellectual
intuition, nor in mystical vision” (Ricoeur 1970, p. 43). To become conscious of the self,
one’s existence must be reflected back in a density of action. Reflection is thus the
reappropriation of our effort to exist. Ricoeur (1974) writes,
Now why is it necessary to characterize this recovery as an appropriation and even
as a reappropriation? I must recover something which has first been lost. I
“appropriate” that which is “proper” to me, that which has ceased to be mine. I
make “mine” that from which I am separated by space or time, by distraction or
“diversion”, or by virtue of some guilty act of forgetting. The concept of
appropriation signifies that the original situation from which reflection proceeds is
“forgetfulness”; I am lost, “astray” among the objects of the world, separated from
the centre of my own existence, just as I am separated from others and the enemy of
all. Whatever may be the secrete of this separation, this diaspora, it signifies that I
do not originally possess that which I am. (p. 328-329)
We do have a sense that we exist but this preconfigured grasp of oneself is more a
feeling than an articulated narrative. As Ricoeur (1974) says, “I merely feel that I exist
and that I think. The mere feeling that I am awake is the essence of apperception.” (p.
327). Before the culmination of his work on personal identify in Oneself as Another
(1990/1992) Ricoeur tended to emphasize a capturing of the self in monuments and
deeds. Kaufmann (1980) comments that many people would not claim that deeds and
monuments were most reflective of their selfhood. He writes, “Many…would consider it
grandiloquent to speak of their “deeds,” nor do they identify with their lives and works.
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What is likely to seem most personal to them and to define them as individuals is their
feelings or emotions” (p. 453). There is controversy over what is most essential to
awareness of the self, feelings or deeds. In Ricoeur’s later work, it is the otherness of the
deeds and monuments that brings about a sense of self. To focus not on the person but on
their actions and deeds is to develop a sense of the history of the person and their
trajectory through time. Otherness becomes a foundation for understanding selfhood.
Ricoeur (1992/1993) writes, “Various assertions related to personal identity may be held
as answers, or parts of answers, to a series of questions implying the interrogative
pronoun who” (p. 110). The feeling that one exists invites the telling of who is feeling.
Awareness of sensations, feelings, and emotions bids the telling of a story and the sense
of a person. It is in this way that I may feel that I am yet still be lost to who I am.
Reflecting on and explaining accounts of human experience can illuminate the
intentions, motivations, aim, presuppositions, values, hopes, and desires of the actions
and feelings expressed. From a hermeneutic standpoint there is awareness of the being
coextensive with the representations used to symbolize experience. Ricoeur (1974)
writes, “Understanding is thus no longer a mode of knowledge but a mode of being, the
mode of that being which exists through understanding” (p. 7). Awareness is seen to be
radically temporal, arising within a historical inheritance of meaning and across
temporary features of the one who is aware. From Ricoeur’s earliest theses, the task of
how things are interpreted has been secondary to the hermeneutic problem of how to
theorize symbol as both the bearer of meaning and yet also capable of innovative
meanings (Ricoeur, 1967, p. 350). Theorizing the relationship between phenomena and
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meaning is central to the work of hermeneutic analysis. To this end, Ricoeur does not
devise a method of interpretation, but introduces the dynamic tension of interpretation.
The three moments of a hermeneutic analysis are moments of univocal
phenomenology, multivocal reflection, and silent ontology. With awareness of what is,
reflection stirs up meaning and then falls silent as it stills in one’s being. While first we
lose our way in a labyrinth of inquiry, certainty is recovered after it has been lost and
then profoundly transformed into being. A hermeneutics of narrative breaks open the
ground of discourse to sense the movement of meaning, to discover an origin and aim of
consciousness, and to realize this consciousness as expressing a speaker. This task
involves the interface of tradition and revelation and raises the puzzle of how symbol can
retain meaning and receive meaning, of how metaphors can be bound and yet free, of
how narrative generates enigmas while restoring understanding.
Arbitrating Multiple Hermeneutic Traditions
Ricoeur arbitrates a number of traditions in philosophy. Using the hermeneutics
of suspicion found in the works of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the reflexive
philosophy of Jean Nabert, phenomenology in the tradition of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty
and Mircea Eliade, and hermeneutics in the tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer, along
with aspects of the Frankfurt School and Habermas’ critical theory, Ricoeur develops his
own position that could be called a narrative dialectical phenomenological ontological
hermeneutics except for the awkward pretension that it invokes. Ricoeur is not a
Heideggerian hermeneut and his philosophy differs from Husserl and Habermas in
several crucial ways. In conclusion, I will summarize Ricoeur’s philosophical position
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within the hermeneutic traditions that have influenced him. In the end, a more eloquent
depiction of Ricoeurian hermeneutics could perhaps be termed narrative hermeneutics.
Ricoeur has been accused of being a closet structuralist, a liberal humanist, and a
post-modern textualist (see Clarke, 1997; Lavine, 1995). It is difficult to imagine how
such disparate characterizations could be used to describe the same person. Once inside,
everything is Heideggerian. Ricoeurian hermeneutics has many points of entry and
accommodates many philosophical backgrounds. The many traditions valued within
Ricoeur’s philosophy make it possible to enter with a variety of different languages and
customs. To truly understand Heidegger we are required to learn his language and enter
his world. Ricoeur is less insular and this makes it easier to find ways of conversing, but
also easier to criticize from a number of positions. Although Ricoeur maintains that all
awareness of meaning is mediated by representation, he refuses a hermeneutics purely
concerned with the analysis of linguistic actions and considers the possibility of
understanding when knowledge is finite, historical, mediated by text, and embodied in
existence. Ricoeur is committed to a process of hermeneutics that never fully arrives at a
single position. Instead, alternate positions are considered with a depth of sincerity that
constantly signifies a reserve of meaning and the potential for greater understanding.
Refusing to privilege one position by taking another lightly, a Ricoeurian hermeneutics
invites moments of suspension, walks within the tension of difference, and finds revealed
there previously unimagined possibilities.
In the history of hermeneutics Ricoeur sees an oscillating emphasis on
phenomenology, epistemology, and ontology while in his own theory he strives to
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maintain an appreciation of the fluid process of understanding. He does this by taking
seriously both the realism of things that are known and the ways of being entailed by any
form of understanding. His hermeneutics was initially concerned with deciphering
symbols and the process of the literal meaning guiding revelation of the figurative
meaning, (e.g. the symbol sets us thinking, the symbol gives rise to thought), but even in
the beginning Ricoeur includes a structural moment in the reflexive process. The symbol
has phenomenological meaning separate from its being understood. There is no
immediate transparency of meaning. Signs and symbols are necessary to mediate all
meaning. Without the structural aspect of reflection a hermeneutics reverts to immediacy
of awareness as the location of understanding. Meaning has discursive and pre-discursive
moments, but understanding is positioned at the junction of listening and speaking and
not exclusively in either the pre-discursive or discursive. Greater understanding is
possible because of the exchange of listening and speaking.
Ricoeur’s complex theory of reference permits a form of empirical reality within
a phenomenological hermeneutics. The realist dimension of hermeneutics resides in the
ability of all forms of description, all narrative, not only to make reference, but also to
reconfigure. Descriptions, explanations, narratives, texts of all kinds, as well as
monuments, memories, symptoms, and dreams or any action or event that can stand
alone from its author form the basis of life expressing itself. These narratives are not
merely technical references, but potentiate a creative movement inherent to the life and
growth of meaning. The otherness of the representation does not, for Ricoeur, speak to its
ability to refer to reality, but forms the tension at the heart of creative life.
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Refusing to accept the proposition that all experience is interpreted at all times,
Ricoeur retains a form of realism, a place for structuralism, signs, and the validation of
closed systems. As such his work can critique, and not merely dismiss method-based
forms of understanding and intersubjective verification. Ricoeur encourages bracketing
subjectivity long enough to explain the systems of knowledge that are being used to
understand. He (1995) writes, “The universe of meaning cannot be coordinated to the
universe of facts” (p. 189). He wants to maintain the great debate that stems from Dilthey
between explanation and understanding and not allow one to reduce to the other, while
also avoiding losing this debate to a mute opposition. Each is ultimately irreconcilable to
the other; it is the conflicting interpretations of these positions that proffer greater
understanding. Ricoeur defends against unilateral interpretations of all kinds, including
unilateral interpretations of his own hermeneutics. He tells us that he is more antiphenomenological and anti-hermeneutic than his critics are willing to admit (Ricoeur,
1995, p. 190) because he includes moments wherein consciousness is not known to itself
and hermeneutic inquiry is not an issue. Ricoeur advocates neither knowledge for the
sake of knowledge, nor being for the sake of being; but knowledge from being, and being
from knowledge so that one lives and grows through the other.
Ricoeur proposes that if one does not go as far as to accept the autonomous reality
of the referent from the reading of its intended meanings then we are led back to relying
on unreflective awareness and the primacy of immediate consciousness as the basis of
understanding. External to the linguisticality of things, Ricoeur acknowledges forces that
act upon the formations of meaning similar to Habermas’ appreciation of the non-
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linguistic forces, like power, that act to distort communication. Ricoeur seriously
concerns himself with the socio-political analyses of the Frankfurt School, specifically
Habermas’ unease with those hidden forces that distort communication. This
prelinguistic realism helps to anchor meaning for Ricoeur. Hermeneutics alone is not
enough, but neither is the referent. Ricoeur claims more space for empirical objects and
scientific forms of validation than Gadamer and Heidegger. He does not reduce method
to the interpreted text of a subject. Meaning and representation are not equivalent to
existence even though all existence is existence interpreted. Ricoeur in this sense is less
of a hermeneut than Heidegger and Gadamer who thoroughly dissolve the natural world
of “forces” and exclusively focus on all the world as interpreted, all the world as text,
including forces. Continually struggling to maintain the aporias of a dialectical position,
Ricoeur preserves the tension between structuralist phenomenology, hermeneutic inquiry,
and cultural critique. The practices, methods, and politics of a way of life are all ground
for, and consequence of ways of understanding.
Ihde (1995) recognizes the dialectic version of hermeneutics developing
throughout Ricoeur’s work and supports Ricoeur’s position in writing that, “any single
perspective approach will always remain insufficient to penetrate the insights needed” (p.
64). A dialectical hermeneutics demands the tension of opposing forces to explain the
process of understanding. The most characteristic aspect of Ricoeur’s dialectic approach
is its respectful consideration of all positions. Although it hopes for resolution, it does not
arrive. Ricoeur refuses to diminish difference because anything that weakens a conflict of
interpretations diminishes the potential for understanding. Without difference there
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cannot be dialogue between positions and the recurrent hope of greater meaning. Without
the incompleteness of a dialogical position, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics would crystallize
into a grand narrative of the hermeneutics of meaning. Ricoeurian hermeneutics is
thoroughly narrative and favours what Ihde calls the “event history” (p. 69) of a JudeoChristian tradition where story and not axioms of truth are central to conveying meaning.
Once it has happened, an event does not change; but the meaning of events can change as
they are read and reread. The tension between what was and what is understood forms
the basis for the generative dialogue about the meaning of existence. While rational and
empirical processes of explanation are important to the process of being understood,
understanding also involves being evaluated, critiqued, and recognized by another. In the
uniquely constrained communication of relationship, recollection can strive to
emancipate meaning. Thus it is possible to appreciate the task of narration as
explanation, understanding, and as an emancipatory enterprise. Ricoeur’s philosophy can
simultaneously acknowledge contextual hermeneutic understanding, objective scientific
explanation, and the hope for liberated speech.
A Ricoeurian hermeneutics is an approach to interpreting a world that is always
already interpreted. Integral to the process of understanding is a pre-discursive moment
that has the potential to be amplified in speech. This phenomenological moment signifies
the realism of the world that Ricoeur struggles to include. Simultaneously, this moment
is an interpreted moment. Meaning is tacit and mute until objectified interpretations
point to what is narrated in the effort to understanding. Empirical on one analysis, textual
on another, we are unable to ever fully capture all of its potential significance. Differing
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interpretations enter into conversation, until settling once again into our practices of
living.
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CHAPTER THREE: HERMENEUTIC PSYCHE/ANALYSIS
Introduction to Freud
The original writings of Freud on the technique of psychoanalysis (Freud
1895/1955, 1898/1962, 1900/1953, 1904/1953, 1905/1953, 1910/1958a, 1910/1958b,
1911/1958, 1912/1958b, 1912/1958c, 1913/1958, 1914/1958, 1914/1964, 1915/1958,
1916-17/1964, 1920/1964, 1923/1964, 1926/1964, 1933/1964, 1937/1964a, 1937/1964b,
1940/1964) provide an outline for understanding and working with narrative in terms of
the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and ontological moments we have seen in Ricoeur’s
analysis of understanding. The practice of psychoanalysis involves the interplay of
phenomenological forces and hermeneutic readings of those forces. In psychoanalysis,
the telling of life narratives can be considered the phenomena that are reflected upon,
interpreted, and re-appropriated in a therapeutic relationship. But psychoanalysis is more
than a hermeneutics of the phenomena of discourse; it is also a way of being in the world
and the therapeutic impact of psychoanalysis must work with the dynamics of this being.
In this chapter I will begin with an explanation of classical psychoanalytic
practice. This depiction is taken from my reading of the original writings of Freud on
technique. In summarizing the different aspects of psychoanalytic practice I make
comparisons between the process of analysis and Ricoeur’s hermeneutic moments of
understanding, and contrast Freud’s positivist understanding of psychoanalysis with
Ricoeur’s hermeneutic interpretation. Although Ricoeur does not make this comparison
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between practice and hermeneutics, I hope it will help to further clarify how
psychoanalysis can be considered a hermeneutics of discourse.
Freud’s psychoanalytic technique brings the theory, the method, and the world of
the analyst and, what he terms the analysand, or patient together in the action of
interpretation. Each element is limited and constituted in relation to the other. To
understand the technique of psychoanalysis, then, something of the Freudian
metapsychology must be understood as well as the world of the analyst and analysand. In
what follows, I begin by sketching aspects of psychoanalytic theory that seem most
relevant to the practice. Following this I lay out Freud’s recommendations on technique,
recommendations that apply to the analysand as well as the analyst. Highlighting the
more salient structural aspects of the practice provides a sense of what happens in the
practice of psychoanalysis. From here I illustrate how the technique of psychoanalysis
involves not just theory and technique, but a way of being in the world. What makes
psychoanalysis therapeutic is not its theoretical understanding, its structural
arrangements, or its interpretations, but the recognition that can be enacted within a
therapeutic relationship because of these conditions; a relationship that embodies the
beliefs and practices of psychoanalysis.
Theory: Metapsychology
A central focus of psychoanalytic inquiry is the conflict that seems to subtend all
psychic phenomena. As Freud develops his theory of psychoanalysis the location of this
conflict takes various manifestations, but there is always some form of tension involved
in mental life. In his writings on the interpretation of dreams and symptoms Freud
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conceives of a tension between the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious. This is the
first division or topography of the psyche that Freud uses to explain the phenomena of
psychoanalysis. The second topography evolves from the interpretation of culture, art,
ideals, and idols. In this topography the psyche is depicted in the relations of the Id, the
Ego, and the Superego (literally, the It, the I and the Over-I). A third topography is
introduced later when libido is split into two different aspects: Eros and Thanatos. In this
third topography forces are redistributed in terms of a love-death polarity. In this way,
Freud’s conception of the divisions and workings of the psyche becomes progressively
less mechanistic in the course of his writing. As Ricoeur writes, “We can thus pick out a
sensible continuum which goes from a mechanistic representation of the psychic
mechanism to a romantic dramaturgy of life and death” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 165).
Conflict is the central tendency of mental life, but not all mental life is neurotic.
Opposition between apparently incompatible forces or structures becomes neurotic when
the conflict is in part unconscious. A neurotic conflict results in unwitting and sometimes
troublesome expressions of one’s desire to be. As long as the conflict is not allowed
expression in awareness, it cannot be brought to issue and turns to expression in
symptoms, dreams, and slips.
An example of this fundamental notion of psychic conflict is illustrated in Freud’s
(1912/1958a) paper On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love. In
this paper, conflicts of interest are understood as they manifest in the difference between
the desires of the individual and the civilization in which the individual lives. Libido, a
hypothetical nervous energy that derives from the body, takes the form of affectionate
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attachments toward caregivers beginning in infancy and continuing throughout
childhood. Although controversial13, according to Bettelheim’s (1983) understanding of
Trieb libido is not so much an instinct as a drive. It is the power or energy to get things
done and involves enthusiasm and aggressive vigour. It can be thought of as a motive or
tendency coming from within, inner propulsion, impelling force, or the sudden
inclination to act without conscious thought. Libido manifests along the spectrum of love
from its sexual aspects, through sensuality, into friendly affection, and perhaps even into
divine love. Freud (1912/1958b) argues that generally all emotional relations of
friendship, trust, sympathy, and affection are “derived from purely sexual desires through
the softening of their sexual aim” (p. 105). Social forces that regulate the maintenance of
acceptable human relations constrain the expression of the libidinal drive.
Early in life a model is established for expressing affection based on interactions
with caregivers. Although there are sexual undercurrents to these affections, prepubescent libidinal investments are predominately affectionate in their expression. At
puberty, the strength of the sexual aspect of the libido increases, but due to the universal
social taboo against incest, sexual affections expressed toward family members are
discouraged and the adolescent must find socially appropriate objects to express their
burgeoning sexual desires. If the childhood affections are surmounted and a new love
object is chosen the new libidinal object choice will tend to be modeled on early
attachments and there ensues a psychic tension of libidinal expression. With the new love
A difference of opinion as to the nature of libido fuelled the demise of Freud and Jung’s
relationship and interpretations of the fundamental force behind psychic phenomena continue to
13
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interest the sexual current of libidinal attraction is admitted, but insofar as the new
person is chosen on the basis of past experiences with family, he or she represents the
forbidden desires of childhood and are a memento of this original loss. The libido seeks
love objects that are reminiscent of incest insofar as all aspects of love are modeled on
original attachments. Unconscious of the conflict, but not wanting to relinquish
affectionate attachments toward family, nor sensual relations toward the lover, a degree
of tension develops between the sexual and affectionate currents. In adjusting to this
reality, affection may be diminished in the face of sexual interests and the affectionate
and sexual currents of libido may be driven further apart. Neurotic insistence on ascetic
familial relations and the sexual prowess of sensual affairs diverts psychic energy into
obfuscating the relation between sex and affection.
Possibilities of being become determined by this polarized tension seeking
expression and acknowledgement. Manifestations of affection can become severely split
from that of sexuality to the point of dichotomizing love into a complex of exalt/debase.
If the opposition between affection and sexuality is severe then sexuality will be
expressed only at the expense of concealing affection. The more debased the love interest
the more erotic it can become because the less it resembles affection. Denial of affection
protects the lover from breeching the incest taboo and frees the lover to full sexual
expression with their most debased partner. Conversely, as expressions of affection are
devoid of any sexual potency, loved ones are respected to the point of glorification while
be controversial in psychoanalytic circles.
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the sexual vitality of their relations is depleted. In both cases an element of the
phenomena as experienced is lost to fantasy.
Freud goes on to say that the union of the two currents is possible in rare
instances. With great amounts of self-awareness, perhaps through psychoanalysis,
individuals may become conscious of the disavowed currents of libido. By bringing into
awareness the complex of forces, such individuals may have the strength to bear the
conflict in consciousness instead of impulsively and unconsciously acting out from it.
Love then gains a fullness of motivation as energy devoted to the repression of one or the
other current becomes freed and consciousness is liberated to realize more fully one’s
existence. If, however, the conflict is not contained and supported in consciousness then
the expression of desire must find other means. At issue are the conditions of our
civilization and forces shaping the expression of our desires, but raising the conflict into
awareness is humiliating to the Ego. To be aware of our situation, of the loss of original
love with its unparalleled innocence and fullness of affection, of sexual desire and social
limits on its expression, and to accept the inevitability of sexual tension, is to be
wounded by the frustrations of reality. The paradox is that to gain the free flow of libido,
the Ego must accept this wound and its inevitability.
Giving up the idea of permanently resolving the conflict of desire is not to
renounce something attainable; rather, fantasy is renounced where reality is gained.
Accepting the conflict widens the horizon of consciousness and provides the freedom to
be at home with the being that we are. The conflict of tendencies is not resolved but
acknowledged and accepted. The therapeutic aspect of psychoanalysis resides in the
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change of dynamic tension effected by recognition, understanding, and acceptance of our
being in the world. Ego strength increases with the ability to accept and bear the tension
of one’s being. The aim of analysis is to bear phenomena of existence into awareness of
meaning. In this sense Freud has his own version of the hermeneutic circle. In the theory
of psychoanalysis Freud begins with general human phenomena, dramas central to human
life. He explains these phenomena in terms of drives, contending forces, currents of
energy, repression, and structural tension that in turn shape phenomena to be explained.
Through interpretation the phenomena become meaningful in new ways and with greater
understanding. The tension between what is unknown and what is known diminishes
until the meaning of the phenomena returns to the silent understanding of being until,
again, being arises as phenomena upon reflection.
There are many narrative accounts that derive from the ambiguity of desire and
conflicts mind. Each representation is affected by the history of the persons involved in
the telling, but the underlying principle remains the same. Portions of meaning are kept
out of awareness and tension develops as desire finds expression that is not
acknowledged. The conditions of analysis reveal mental conflict enacted in the analytic
session. The techniques of psychoanalysis are meant to make conflicts of the mind
apparent. How the ambiguity of desire is therapeutically handled in the session evolves
from a focus on the patient to a focus on the analytic relationship, but throughout there is
this tension between dynamic forces of expression and the meaningful interpretation of
these forces.
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Historical Developments
In “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” (1914/1958) Freud traces
the development of psychoanalytic technique from its initial focus on childhood
experiences at the origin of symptom formation to concern with whatever is on the mind
of the analysand in the present moment. In the early days of Freud’s association with
Josef Breuer (Gay, 1988), treatment consisted of bringing to light, under hypnosis, the
original moment when a symptom was formed. Hypnosis was used to relax the critical
faculty and aid the therapeutic process of remembering and abreacting. Abreaction was
the process that required patients to remember, reproduce, and recognize mental
phenomena of the situation in which symptoms were originally formed. The emotions
associated with a repressed memory were re-experienced and their intensity discharged
into conscious awareness. At this stage in the development of psychoanalytic technique it
was unclear if awareness of the emotional force, or working out the significance of the
repressed experience, was the key to recovery. Freud (1895/1955) writes,
Each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when
we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it
was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had
described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words.
(p. 255)
However, Freud became dissatisfied with the transient effectiveness of hypnosis.
He (1905/1953) explains, “I gave up the suggestive technique, and with it hypnosis, so
early in my practice because I despaired of making suggestion powerful and enduring
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enough to effect permanent cures” (p. 261). Besides its limited effectiveness, hypnosis
presented a further difficulty as patients tended to become flagrantly enamoured with
their hypnotists. Eventually, hypnosis was replaced with the method of free association 14
and the task of psychoanalysis was to discover from the patient’s free associations
forgotten emotional experience. Abreaction remained a component of treatment.
Analysis still attempted to abreact quotas of affect strangled by repression, but
resistances were circumvented by uncritical free association instead of hypnosis. Analysis
remained concerned with focusing on the original situations that gave rise to symptom
formation, but instead of abreaction being central to the therapeutic process,
interpretations were used to overcome the criticism that halted free association.
Initially, Freud approached the treatment of mental illness in the same way as
physical illness. He attempted to trace the symptom’s origin and the course of its
development. Mental events were traced to earlier and earlier events out of which they
were believed to develop. The effects of the patient’s constitutional disposition and
situational factors were also considered etiological factors. Original experiences were
overlaid by many different experiences over the course of development, but were not
entirely lost. Freud (1914/1957) explained that, “None of the infantile mental formations
perish. All the wishes, instinctual impulses, modes of reaction and attitudes of childhood
are still demonstrably present in maturity and in appropriate circumstances can emerge
once more” (p. 49). The past, therefore, exists in original form underneath what proceeds
14
Bettelheim (1983) makes an important point that free association is a misnomer insofar as
associations are not free, but contingent or related somehow to what came before. The term “free
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from it. By following a patient’s life history the psychoanalyst could uncover the origin
of the illness underneath its phenomenological representation.
In Freud’s later versions of psychoanalysis knowing the history and origin of
symptoms receded in importance and a new analytic method emerged that required
bringing resistances to consciousness. The aim was the same, to overcome resistances
due to repression, but the method by which to best achieve this goal changed. Efforts of
analysis turned from focusing on past events to recognizing resistances and finding ways
to make these resistances conscious to the patient. The method shifted from interpreting
conflicting desires at the origin of the symptom formation to interpreting the form
resistance takes in its effort to disavow and avoid the repulsive. Therapeutically it
became less important to explain the origin of the forces shaping expressions and more
important to become aware of how expression continues to be shaped. The task was to
remove resistance to consciousness not by interpreting repressed meaning, but by
managing the repression of unpleasant conflict through the analytic relationship. Thus,
the primary purpose of classical Freudian analysis is not to make intellectual
interpretations about the origin of a symptom, but rather to increase awareness of
resistances that hold socially unsavoury experiences out of consciousness and ultimately
to overcome these resistances.
From the analyst’s chair, uncovering the distant origins of neurosis, the
precipitating trauma, is necessarily speculative. Symptoms, like all expressions of
existence, are overdetermined in the sense that they have many factors determining their
association” refers to ideas that suddenly come to mind; as in “it comes to mind that”.
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manifestation. Psychological phenomena are not caused in the same way as empirical
phenomena. They are visible only in the sense that they can be understood. They emerge
from a network of interpersonal significance. Therefore, locating a single event involved
in the precipitation of a psychological phenomenon becomes less relevant. Free
association is used in psychoanalysis to enable the analysand to overcome the critical
editing of thought, emotion, and experience in order to follow recollections to their
conclusions not to their origins. This process is not about recovering a repressed
emotional event in a massive cathartic gesture of awareness and release. Rather, analysis
is concerned with effects in the present and not the past. Mental illness is a present-day
force and not an event of the past. The difficult work of the analyst is to keep herself and
her patient attending to present tense experience, even if it is present tense experience of
past events. Analysis focuses on what is actually happening in the therapeutic encounter
in order to identify and circumvent resistance to recognizing expressions of desire.
Interpretations are made by the analyst to enable the analysand to become conscious of
how her resistances manifest themselves.
In Freudian theory the unconscious is a realm of significance not immediately
accessible that communicates through derivative expressions. The unconscious
expression of expectations and fantasies is energy capable of manifesting in conscious
awareness. The libido is drained into defences against repeated dissatisfaction and used
to avoid recognizing the difficult aspects of one’s being in the world. Unconscious
expressions are substitutes for remembering. Psychoanalysis attempts to retrieve a
portion of the libido that has been redirected into fantasy. Freud (1912/1958b) writes,
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“The unconscious impulses do not want to be remembered in the way the treatment
desires them to be, but endeavour to reproduce themselves in accordance with the
timelessness of the unconscious and its capacity for hallucination” (p. 108). The stronger
the resistance to recognizing desire the greater the compulsion to act out desire’s conflict.
As long as the ambiguity is unconscious it is not recognized as the tension at the centre of
one’s way of being and the unacknowledged continues to find unconscious expression.
The central work of analysis is not to replace ignorance with knowledge, but to overcome
psychological resistance, accept the ambiguity of our impulses into consciousness, and
generate understanding.
The shift in psychoanalytic technique from dealing with a situation that caused
the formation of symptoms to working with the dynamics that hold disavowed
experiences out of consciousness is paralleled by a shift in the theory of neuroses. This
shift is characterized by the difference between regarding the etiology of neurosis in
traumatic experience to regarding the etiology of neurosis as a product of the
psychological struggle for expression. Freud abandoned his traumatic theory of the
etiology of neurosis in favour of an explanation of the etiology of psychopathology based
in mental conflict15. Instead of working with an empirical cause located in a historical
event, psychoanalysis is concerned with multi-determined social cultural cause and
multi-vocal psychological phenomena. Trauma is inescapable in life and conflict
15
Although Masson (1984) accused Freud of abandoning the seduction theory of hysteria because
of political pressure to avoid harming the reputations of eminent Viennese professional men and
their relations with their daughters, this has been thoroughly discredited by both pro and anti-
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inevitable. Neuroses develop neither because of trauma nor conflict, but because the Ego
is not strong enough to suffer conflict and accept the drama of life into consciousness.
Revisiting The Techniques
Freud developed several guidelines in his papers on technique aimed at
overcoming resistance. The techniques are interesting because they depict a unique way
of arriving at understanding. Phenomenological conditions shape what is known and
what comes to be understood. Six papers written in the years 1911-1915 are as near as
Freud comes to a systematic account of psychoanalytic technique. However, both
explicitly in his instructions on technique, and implicitly in his case histories, Freud
encourages analysts to accommodate method to the idiosyncrasies of the persons
involved. He (1912/1958c) writes,
I must however make it clear that what I am asserting is that this technique is the
only one suited to my individuality…a physician quite differently constituted might
find himself driven to adopt a different attitude to his patients and to the task before
him. (p. 111)
Freud emphasizes how the personalities involved in analysis have an over-riding
influence on technique. He does not suggest technique should be indiscriminately
adhered to without variation. Style of communication is unique to a situation. How
people connect, the manner in which relationships are formed, is personal and depends
Freudians (See Leahey, 2000). Freud recognized the reality of child sexual abuse, but doubted it
was the cause of hysteria.
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on the individuals involved. Therefore, strict adherence to the rules of psychoanalysis
would be an error and a false representation of Freud’s intention 16.
Although Freud encouraged his followers to find their own style he insisted that
the basic intention of psychoanalysis to work with the drama of human existence remain
unchanged. In North America, however, this did not happen. Instead, there was strict
adherence to the method and technique of analysis at the expense of the original
psychoanalytic intention. Bettelheim (1982) laments that in the English-speaking world
psychoanalysis lost its literary richness. Because of the events of WWII, the practice of
psychoanalysis was nearly eliminated in Europe while much of its activity survived in the
medical community in North America. English translations of Freud’s writing became a
large and influential force. Even though Freud repeatedly insisted that psychoanalysis not
be considered solely within a medical framework, Freud’s official translator, James
Strachey, tended to use technical terms for many psychoanalytic concepts and
psychoanalysis took on a medical and scientific character. Orthodox Freudian analysis
became a very formalized practice, roles were ritualized, and analysts became remote in
accordance with a strict set of behavioural criteria. Freud, however did not want to upset
his translator from his task of translating twenty-four volumes of writing and so did not
insist on less technical terms.
16
Gay (1988) states that on December 31 st, 1909 Freud wrote in a letter to Swiss existentialist
psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger that doubt and independent thought was sacred to him and that
although he had severed relations with several analysts because of their unorthodoxy (Jung, Adler,
Stekel), he sustained relations with several more who remained faithful to the original theory (p.
243). Although Freud encouraged independence in his followers he tended to become embroiled
in passionate debates with both fellow psychoanalysts and other academics.
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In the 21st century there are innumerable interpretations of psychoanalytic theory
and practice, but only the salient features of classical psychoanalytic practice will be
depicted here. As a testament to its hermeneutic character, psychoanalytic practice does
not have a single interpretation or uniform application. What seems most salient across
all variations of psychoanalysis is its hermeneutic character. Frosh (1997) identifies some
common beliefs:
Despite all their divergences over matters of theory, technique and therapeutic aim,
all schools of psychoanalysis share the belief that clarifying and resolving
psychological issues will help the individual perceive the features of the external
world more clearly…inner conflict fuels the difficulty of what is outside, and more
generally it is through psychological processes that events in the world are perceived
and made meaningful. (p. 84)
In general, analysis begins within a discursive relationship wherein phenomena
are identified as representations of conflicting desires. New interpretations bring greater
understanding that is accepted into one’s sense of existence and a fullness of being is
returned to one’s world. What follows is a depiction of how this process unfolds
according to Freud’s written depiction of the practice of psychoanalysis.
Recommendations for Treatment
To begin analysis a reliable space in time must be determined. Frequency of
sessions must be established invariably for each patient and analysands must agree to
lease time from the analyst, time for which they are liable even if they do not make use of
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it. Freud (1913/1958) recommends beginning the treatment with the following
instructions to the analysand:
Before I can say anything to you I must know a great deal about you; please tell me
what you know about yourself…One more thing before you start. What you tell me
must differ in one respect from an ordinary conversation. Ordinarily you rightly try
to keep a connecting thread running through your remarks and you exclude any
intrusive ideas that may occur to you and any side-issues, so as not to wander too far
from the point. But in this case you must proceed differently. You will notice that as
you relate things various thoughts will occur to you which you would like to put
aside on the ground of certain criticisms and objections. You will be tempted to say
to yourself that this or that is irrelevant here, or is quite unimportant, or nonsensical,
so that there is no need to say it. You must never give in to these criticisms, but must
say it in spite of them - indeed, you must say it precisely because you feel an
aversion to doing so. Later you will find out and learn to understand the reason for
this injunction, which is really the only one you have to follow. So say what ever
goes through your mind. Act as though, for instance, you were a traveler sitting next
to the window of a railway carriage and describing to someone inside the carriage
the changing views which you see outside. Finally, never forget that you have
promised to be absolutely honest, and never leave anything out because, for some
reason or other, it is unpleasant to tell it. (p. 135)
Free associations are expected to proceed smoothly after this introduction. Unconscious
forbidden material will be revealed no matter the degree of censorship consciously
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executed. Freud sees expression of unconscious conflicts in the slightest gestures and
movements of the body, but these are generally incomprehensible. However, in case of
much silence, and only at the beginning of treatment, the patient can be encouraged
repeatedly and energetically that it is impossible for no ideas at all to occur. Expressions
of conflict in free association come to be forged by the dynamics of the analytic
relationship and are ultimately read by way of this relationship.
Frosh (1997) explains that within the strict boundaries of the analytic session a
highly unusual and unreal situation is created in which the analysand is free to speak
without consequence. Paradoxically, the analysand does not then speak without
constraint, but rather the unconscious is seen to manifest powerful restrictions on the
narrative. Frosh (1997) writes, “It is not, therefore, the analytic situation which places a
limit on freedom, but the actuality of human subjectivity” (p. 102). The highly
circumscribed conditions of the analysis bring to light pre-reflective phenomena of the
analysand’s world.
Evenly Suspended Attention or Neutrality
A preliminary period is initially recommended wherein the patient does all the
talking and the analyst does not make any interpretations. This preliminary sounding is
conducted mostly to develop an assessment and to evaluate the diagnosis. The
assessment, however, is not a deliberate formulation, but arises by way of insight. Freud
maintains that for successful analysis both analyst and analysand must attend freely to
what arises and accept everything without criticism. Freud (1912/1958c) tells us that,
“Thinking something over or concentrating the attention solves none of the riddles of a
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neurosis” (p. 119). Instead of intellectually deciphering the material as it presents, the
first task of analysis is to uncritically gather impressions and to wander as freely as
possible with any content of the mind. “He should”, Freud (1912/1958c) writes,
“withhold all conscious influences from his capacity to attend and give himself over
completely to his ‘unconscious memory…He should simply listen, and not bother about
whether he is keeping anything in mind” (p. 112). This style of attention is what is meant
by neutrality. It does not mean that the analyst takes up an objective position of knowing.
Neutrality permits the analyst to freely associate to the analysand’s free associations.
Thereby, the analyst uses his unconscious, and not his conscious Ego, as a tool for
understanding the unconscious of the patient. Instead of reflecting on the material and
developing a course of action, the analyst listens and notices what expectations and
inclinations for action arise upon listening to the material. Deliberate selection and
selective attending is replaced with a free-floating attention that helps the analyst to
become absorbed in the analysand’s world and eventually to become aware of the
meaning that develops in that world and the possible interpersonal forces that have
shaped the development of the meaning.
The unconscious meaning of the phenomenological moment of classical
psychoanalysis prevents conscious reflection from taking possession of any event. The
method aims to allow all communications to enter into and be contained in the analytic
situation. Even the most seemingly irrelevant thought must be included to avoid adopting
a critical stance. By developing an attitude of open receptivity, free of censorship, free of
critique, the analyst can become absorbed in the events of analysis. Instead of critically
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reflecting on the material of the analysis, the analysand and analyst in their highly
circumscribed situation manifest phenomena. Freud (1900/1953) writes on the difference
between reflection and free attention:
I have noticed in my psycho-analytic work that the whole frame of mind of a man
who is reflecting is totally different from that of a man who is observing his own
psychical processes. In reflection there is one more psychical activity at work than in
the most attentive self-observation, and this is shown amongst other things by the
tense looks and wrinkled forehead of a person pursuing his reflections as compared
with the restful expression of a self-observer. In both cases attention must be
concentrated, but the man who is reflecting is also exercising his critical faculty; this
leads him to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them, to cut
short others without following the trains of thought which they would open up to
him, and to behave in such a way towards still others that they never become
conscious at all and are accordingly suppressed before being perceived. (p. 101-102)
For Ricoeur this aspect of the process of understanding might be comparable to
the phenomenological moment of a hermeneutics wherein one becomes lost to the
impositions of conscious significance and receives a pre-reflective involuntary
understanding through one’s being in the world. Diagnosis and treatment first require a
kind of listening and implicit understanding that does not initially take possession of the
narrative. Similar to the phenomenological moment of understanding it is necessary to
become caught-up in a situation before it is possible to understand the situation
reflectively. The neutrality incumbent upon the analyst fosters a mutual certainty of being
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with one another such that minds, horizons, and histories meet. The analyst works to
become aware of any desire to manipulate the narrative of the analysand and abducts to
awareness the compulsion to act.
Interpretations are, of course, part of the analytic process. However, listening to
the narrative, making phenomena intelligible, and communicating interpretations are
distinguishable aspects of analysis. Listening to free associations is phenomenologically
distinct from the awareness that sunders meaning from being and begins the conflict of
interpretations. “The correct behaviour for an analyst”, Freud (1912/1958c) tells us, “lies
in swinging over according to need from one mental attitude to another, in avoiding
speculation or brooding over cases while they are in analysis, and in submitting the
material obtained to a synthetic process of thought only after the analysis is concluded”
(p. 114). To this end, the analyst avoids taking notes except as reminders for important
dates, dream text, or significant events. Such restraint is believed to reinforce the
important boundary between listening and interpreting. If there is to be an effective
movement of understanding, receiving phenomena must be distinguished from reflecting
on the meaning of phenomena. A lack of discernment would be detrimental to the
process of analysis because interpretations of phenomena would be intractable from the
phenomena of narrative resulting in continued patterns of unreflective responses.
Dynamics shaping the narrative and its meaning would become lost to interpretation. By
maintaining a distinction between phenomena and interpretations of phenomena,
conflicts of meaning can bring forth new awareness. In this case, the difference lies
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between significance inherent in the phenomenon and the latent significance revealed by
reflecting on the phenomena.
To further the aim of keeping the analyst’s conscious Ego from taking over the
narrative and wilfully shaping it with knowing interpretations, Freud recommends the
analyst relinquish the therapeutic ambition that treatment will proceed in a certain way
and produce a particular effect. He (1912/1958c) writes,
The most successful cases are those in which one proceeds, as it were, without any
purpose in view, allows oneself to be taken by surprise by any new turn in them, and
always meets them with an open mind, free from any presuppositions. (p. 114)
The analyst does not wilfully determine the course of treatment, but rather makes
available a space in which to receive a sense of understanding. Convinced that some
particular effect will be achieved constrains the analyst’s attention in a way that does not
facilitate awareness of the dynamics shaping expressions of desire, but instead continues
to ingrain unconscious patterns of being.
Classical Freudian analysis is highly circumscribed by firmly established
conditions. Perhaps most characteristically, the patient lies on the couch while the doctor
remains out of view of the analysand. Mutual visual contact between analyst and patient
occurs briefly upon entering and leaving the session, but otherwise sensory
communication is limited to voice and hearing, leaving much space for the workings of
the imagination. These arrangements are necessary Freud (1913/1958) explains,
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Since, while I am listening to the patient, I too give myself over to the current of my
unconscious thoughts, I do not wish my expressions of face to give the patient
material for interpretations or to influence him in what he tells me. (p. 134)
If analysands are adjusting what they say based on the spontaneous facial expressions and
reactions of the analyst, then it would be difficult for the analyst to distinguish an
awareness of reaction as distinct from the reaction itself making it more difficult to use
the dynamics of the relationship to shift awareness. The analyst’s anonymity is intended
to highlight the subjectivity of the analysand and curtail extraneous contributions to
unconscious forces shaping the analysand’s representations of desire.
A central concern of psychoanalysis is the managing of resistance so it can be
brought to awareness instead of having intrapsychic conflicts problematically repeated
intersubjectively. Although the personal interests and personal concerns of the analyst
can not be left out of the process of interpreting these conflicts, the classical analytic
relationship is a professional relationship in which the analyst tries to gain enough
distance to become conscious of the dynamics and pulls for meaning that seem to be
manifesting in the relationship. Emotions and expectations can, in the artificial and
highly unusual situation of analysis, manifest in a fashion more salient than is available
in normal conversation with its densely interwoven social influences. The degree to
which the analyst can attend to the actions and reactions being enacted in the relationship
is the degree to which the analysand’s thoughts and feelings can be diverted from action
and directed toward awareness. In classical analysis, what happens in session is assumed
to arise from the analyst’s objective observation of the analysand re-enacting her
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historical condition and not from the mutual interplay of being. Objective observation is
held as the ideal vantage point. However, the analyst’s posture of non-interference,
inhibited social interaction and detachment, influences the relationship that is formed.
Furthermore, identifying dynamics operative in the analytic relationship involves
interpretation. A hermeneutic reading of psychoanalytic practice quickly follows because
the way desire’s ambiguity comes to be understood is unique to the analytic relationship
and is not only dependent on the analysand’s way of being in the world, but also on the
analyst’s17.
In classical analysis the conditions of analysis provide a forum in which the
intrapsychic hermeneutically re-emerges as the interpersonal. When the analysand is seen
to be acting towards the analyst in a way that harkens to events of the past expressing
expectations for the future, then awareness of the transference has begun to develop.
Classical analysis maintains that the analyst becomes identified with someone in the
patient’s past with whom they had significant emotional ties and experiences. A
significant relationship is thereby repeated that is not exclusively influenced by the
present situation, but which is repeating a history. Freud (1914/1958) writes, “The patient
does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He
reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing
Classical analysis is not hermeneutic in its original form. It is generally considered a “oneperson” and not a “two-person” interpersonal psychology. Freud did not propose that
psychoanalysis was a hermeneutic process, but rather as a state wherein the analyst knows what
conflict is motivating the behaviour of the analysand. Unlike Freud, Gill (1992) states, “the role of
the analyst as a person and as a participant in the therapeutic interaction cannot be
overemphasized” (p. 28).
17
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that he is repeating it” (p. 150). The problem must therefore be treated not as an event of
the past, but as a present day force. Not just fantasies but also a meaningful life with
fears, desires, and hopes are incarnate in the analytic session.
Interpretation
Freud (1923/1964) makes several recommendations for making and
communicating interpretations. Most importantly interpretations are not to be
communicated as soon as they are guessed. As long as the phenomena of analysis run on
without obstruction, interpretations are not to be made. Only when resistance develops,
narration falters, or repeats, is it timely to make an interpretation. Interpretations are
never to be made without proper rapport and an established transference. Spontaneous
interpretations are considered highly significant, but if resistances are to be overcome,
and not strengthened, communicating insights must be timed appropriately, with tact, and
ideally in the presence of evidence. To this end, interpretations should be made from the
surface to the depth always addressing the most salient affect first. Instead of making
interpretations about the origin of the conflict, interpretations should focus on the actual
manifestation of the conflict as it is enacted in the transference. A general style of brevity
is advised, non-technical language, and an affirmative yet inquisitive tone.
Each session is to be approached as fresh and unassuming as possible with a
minimum of preconceptions. Interpretations are not carried over and repeated from
session to session because they quickly become irrelevant when they are independent of
the process from which they arise. Interpretations affect change not by bringing
unconscious phenomena to awareness, but by developing a historical perspective wherein
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the present is discernible from past. Expectations are altered because events are given
narrative extension in time. Temporality is seen as part of being in the present. Present
phenomena are experienced as part of one’s historical being in the world and not as alien
events. Interpretation redirects what is alien back to being part of one’s existence.
A classical understanding of psychoanalytic practice tends to promote the idea
that the doctor can arrive at a single correct interpretation. Freud (1923/1964) states:
If one succeeds in arranging the confused heap of fragments, each of which bears
upon it an unintelligible piece of drawing, so that the picture acquires a meaning, so
that there is no gap anywhere in the design and so that the whole fits into the frame if all these conditions are fulfilled, then one knows that one has solved the puzzle
and that there is no alternative solution. (p. 116)
Under the assumption of neutrality, the powerful and privileged position of the
analyst along with the exposed and vulnerable position of the patient, authoritarian
notions of psychoanalytic discourse affirm desires in the world of the analyst while
missing the being of the analysand. In his early writing, Freud recommends urging the
patient to comply with the authority of the analyst’s interpretations. In this case, the
fluidity of meaningful existence is at risk for being rigidly reduced, bottled in an
interpretation, and swallowed whole by the patient. For example, Freud (1914/1964)
writes,
After he has succeeded in forcing the repressed event…upon the patient’s
acceptance in the teeth of all resistances…the patient may say: ‘Now I feel as though
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I had known it all the time.’ With this the work of analysis has been completed. (p.
207)
Classical psychoanalytic practice as depicted in the papers on technique
characterizes the analyst as being detached in a way that seems anathema to the notion of
hermeneutically constituted meaning and more characteristic of positivist knowledge.
Structural and procedural recommendations for the practice create a significant
divergence in the authority of the narratives that emerge. The patient lies supine on the
analyst’s couch and a voice is heard from somewhere behind and above their head. The
analyst is not visible to the patient, but the patient is visible to the analyst. The analyst
generates interpretations while the patient generates material for interpretation. The
analyst remains as anonymous as possible while the patient reveals as much as possible.
The patient’s speech is the object of analysis as free associations are observed and
interpreted and statements are made by the analyst about the patient. Interpretations point
to a disturbing conflict causing irrational behaviour under a variety of situations. The
analyst works through the analysand’s conflict as it manifests in session, but the conflict
remains independent of the analyst/analysand relationship.
Analytic interpretation requires cultivating a posture of consciousness that
becomes inherent to a certain way of being in analysis and in the world. Freud
(1933/1964) explains that, “Psychoanalytic activity is arduous and exacting; it cannot
well be handled like a pair of glasses that one puts on for reading and takes off when one
goes for a walk. As a rule psychoanalysis possesses a doctor either entirely or not at all”
(p. 188). Analysts shape themselves to be an interpretive medium and mediate analytic
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interpretations through self-understandings of their existence. Freud (1937/1964a)
recommends analysts be analyzed every five years because an analyst’s unconscious
conflicts will shape what happens in sessions for the analysand. With repeated selfanalysis the analyst can better discern the workings of their Ego and personal defences
against unconscious conflict. Not just the technique of interpretation or structural
arrangements of the analysis, but also who the analyst has become though self-study and
personal analysis affects the course of analysis.
The psychoanalytic injunction for the analyst to minimize responding to the
patient’s desires diminishes the presence of normal social influence thereby creating an
environment where the psychological material of the patient not only manifests more
freely, but also appears distinct from that of the analyst. An unspeakable desire is
manifest within the analytic relationship, but the objectifying conditions of the session
make it seem as if the expression of desire originates exclusively from the analysand. An
analyst, with positivist pretensions to accessing socially independent, unambiguous
knowledge, may adhere closer to the psychoanalytic principles of conduct (neutrality,
anonymity, evenly suspended attention) to justify the objectivity of their interpretation.
Instead of moving closer to understanding, these principles may give the analyst authority
to posit knowledge about the analysand, justified by analytic method, without
recognizing the embedded, constructed, and social nature of understanding. Because of
the analyst’s extensive training, including a personal analysis (Freud 1937/1964a), the
analyst’s interpretations may be privileged as more accurate. Principled interpretation of
the patient’s speech may be seen to point to the patient’s desires and concerns without
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pointing to the analyst’s. As such, a classical analyst might assume the position of arbiter
of reality, seeing and pointing out the analysand’s expressions of desire without involving
her own. As Merton Gill (1982) points out, there was no name given in classical
psychoanalysis for a patient’s realistic response to the analyst’s counter-transference. The
counter-transference was originally considered an obstacle and an intrusion into the
analytic process that could be avoided.
Although Freud suggested that analysts identify intrapsychic conflicts that shape
and distort the analysand’s thoughts, feelings and beliefs, he also understood expressions
of desire as socially constituted through agreement. Freud (1910/1958a) wrote:
At its beginning psycho-analytic treatment was inexorable and exhausting. The
patient had to say everything himself, and the physician’s activity consisted of
urging him on incessantly. Today things have a more friendly air. The treatment is
made up of two parts - what the physician infers and tells the patient, and the
patient’s working over of what he has heard. (p. 141)
The practice is seen to be an exchange of positions and by 1937 Freud (1937/1964b)
concedes that interpretations are conjectures. He urges the analyst to claim no authority,
but instead to wait and observe the course of future developments. Understanding the
analysand begins to be seen as a process arising out of a convergence of being within a
context, rather than merely the excavation of a psychological object.
Narration is a social, historical, and culturally bound dialogue representing
multiple interests. As such, the analyst is intrinsically involved in the understanding of
the analysand’s difficulty. The conditions brought into the session and the dialogue
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generated gives rise to a discursive relationship that simultaneously points to the analyst
and analysand’s ways of being in the world, as well as generating a world in the analytic
dialogue by the confronting and converging of different positions. Psychoanalysis is
concerned with both the meaning of the analysand’s world and its dialogical constitution.
Positioned together in the analytic session and individually in terms of the systems of
knowledge they bring to sessions, the understanding generated is unique to that narrative.
The being of the analyst and the analysand, along with their relationship, gives life to the
narration, shapes interpretations that are made and what is understood. Furthermore, what
is understood establishes and contributes to the animation and vitality of that way of
being. Psychotherapy, as a narrative hermeneutics of the psyche, is a cultural exchange, a
merging or appropriation of narratives. Stories are told in therapy that both reflect
knowledge and experience as well as organize knowledge and experience, to render and
constitute meaning. Therapist and patient’s unique positions in matrices of understanding
give life to the potential of narration.
Returning to our original example, the psychoanalytic session is an environment
in which the tension between sensual and affectionate currents of libidinal force is
enacted. The conflict that exists, part conscious, part unconscious, is acted out in the
transference relationship. With the aid of the analyst’s interpretations and the
containment provided by the analytic arrangements, the tension can be recognized and
tolerated. What is modeled in the session is the ability to carry on despite the dynamic
tension, the possibility for conflictual currents to be expressed, and yet not gratified. Held
and contained by the arrangements of the session, the Ego is strengthened upon realizing
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that nothing terrible happens and nothing need happen because of the expression.
Awareness does not necessarily increase the tension; the conflict can be contained and
accepted in awareness. Gaining strength to hold the psychic conflict, it then becomes
possible to accept the way that the themes of one’s existence are expressed.
There are several asymmetries in the practice of psychoanalysis that provide
occasion for greater awareness through conflicts of interpretation. Manifest phenomena
give rise to an awareness of latent phenomena; the analyst’s interpretation gives rise to
the analysand’s awareness of an interpretation; an interpretation of the present gives rise
to an interpretation of the past; an awareness of dynamics shaping the expression of
meaning gives rise to a new understanding18. In this way, as one meaning becomes
attainable through another a cycle of understanding can be generated that brings
unconscious action into the clarity of awareness. The analyst’s and the analysand’s
interpretations of phenomena merge and conflict, potentially inspiring fresh insight into
repetitive patterns and a greater capacity for acceptance. Interpretations return a sense of
existence to phenomena as one’s being is brought home to oneself through
understanding. In this way psychoanalysis hopes to liberate a potency and freedom to be.
Freud (1933/1964) writes, “Our first purpose, of course, was to understand the disorders
of the human mind, because a remarkable experience has shown that here understanding
18
The tension of figurative and literal meaning forms a dynamic polarity driving one meaning to
another, but this movement of interpretation is not a consistently proportional relation that can be
formulated into method and procedure. One meaning is in idiosyncratic, but not arbitrary, relation
to a second, depending on the revealing and concealing dynamics of the analytic relationship.
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and cure almost coincide, that a traversable road leads from the one to the other” (p.
145).
Empirical Hermeneutics: A Conflict of Interpretations?
Freud called himself a scientist, not in the German idealist and neo-Kantian sense,
but in the Enlightenment sense where nature is understood as regulated by an
interlocking system of universal laws and all ideas are held to be the product of sense
experience and never of metaphysics or inspiration. Freud believed that psychoanalysis
was a science dealing with timeless forces and the mechanics of how things work, and
that it would develop by way of scientific and not historical method. He anticipated that
hypothesis testing and verification through replication would establish concepts such as
cathexes, Id, and repression as instances of universal laws similar to such objects as
force, mass, and acceleration. He expected that it was only a matter of time before
psychoanalysis was established as an old science in the tradition of the physical sciences
(Freud, 1940/1964).
The psychoanalytic suspiciousness of all claims to self-knowledge applies,
however, even in the case of Freud’s self-understanding. If by science one means the way
of thinking consequent to the scientific revolution of the late 17 th century, Freud’s claim
that psychoanalysis is a science is a misunderstanding widely recognized in 20 th century
psychoanalytic scholarship (Benjamin, 1991; Frosh, 1997; Gill, 1992; Phillips, 1995).
Psychoanalysis attempts to explain phenomena, not by way of independent verification,
but by way of recollection. In the natural sciences theory is related to fact by way of
direct observation. In psychoanalysis there is not such a relationship of theory to fact.
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The analytic relationship with all of its vagaries of desire interpolates between the
phenomenon and the understanding of the phenomenon. The seemingly natural
categories of force, defence, and repression are arrived at not through experimentation
and observation, but through hermeneutic interpretations of interpersonal dramas,
symptoms, dreams, and fantasies (Benjamin, 1991; Habermas, 1968/1971). As Benjamin
(1991) writes, “although classical psychoanalysis claimed to explain, rather than merely
to understand, its understanding actually was the explanation” (p. 526). Furthermore,
understanding in psychoanalysis is not then used to manipulate phenomena in the causal
way that a particle accelerator is used to manipulate electrons; rather it is the
understanding manifest in the analytic relationship that can potentiate a change of
consciousness of the world. Textual analysis and the interpretation of meaning is joined
with managing the forces of psychic reality as the analyst works through the transference
and the energy of expression is converted into the understanding of meaning.
Ricoeur appreciates psychoanalysis as an intermingling of questions of meaning
with questions of force. Drives, the unconscious, and the Id are concepts deciphered in
the effects of their meaning. They are not givens of the natural world, but the products of
awareness. Through reflection psychoanalysis excavates its subject, a subject that is seen
to be dispossessed of itself, appearing as phenomena, and understood as one’s own
existence only with the work of reflection. This ambiguity in psychoanalysis is a
consequence of its dealing phenomenologically with relations of force and
hermeneutically with relations of meaning. Ricoeur (1974) locates “the binding of force
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and meaning in a semantics of desire” (p. 160). The communication of desire 19 is
thoroughly ambiguous and not reducible to science or semiology. Expressions of desire
are delegated by the libido; the libido precedes representation but is only revealed
through representation (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 169). The analyst and analysand are dealing
with interpretations and ways of understanding, but also with alienated aspects of
existence that are experienced as dynamic forces and investments of energy that manifest
phenomena pre-reflectively. Although psychoanalysis cannot be considered natural
science, neither is it entirely based in recollection and interpretation.
Phillips (1991) distinguishes several theorists who view psychoanalysis as a
mixture of hermeneutics and natural science (Apel, 1972; Habermas, 1968/1971;
Ricoeur, 1970) and he tells us that it is only amongst clinicians that theoreticians will be
so bold as to claim psychoanalysis as purely hermeneutic (see for example, Spence 1982;
Schafer, 1992; White, 1995; White & Epston, 1990). Among theoreticians removed from
the practice of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis is considered not only a matter of reading
layers of meaning, but also as working with forces that effect distortions of meaning;
those forces which make it necessary to read beneath the surface in the first place. For
Habermas (1968/1971) this means that psychoanalysis is not a model of inquiry for the
historical sciences, but a prototype for inquiry in the critical sciences. He makes the
distinction between an ordinary hermeneutics that uses exegesis and philology to
19
Freud tends to stay close to more economic and mechanical terms such as libidinal impulses,
conflictual currents, or force. It is Ricoeur who brings the economic and mechanistic language of
classical Freudianism into closer union with hermeneutics. Psychoanalysis, as the phenomenology
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facilitate communication and decipher intentions, and the depth hermeneutics of
psychoanalysis that not only analyzes meaning and misunderstanding, but also works to
decipher “defended-against intentions” and analyze the mechanisms that perpetuate
meanings (Habermas, 1968/1971, p. 276). The goal of analysis is not simply mutual
understanding, but investigation of that understanding and the mechanisms that omit or
distort the meanings that are conveyed.
Ricoeur appreciates that psychoanalysis involves work. On the part of the patient
there is the work of becoming conscious. On the part of the analyst there is the work of
struggling against resistances to recovering awareness at the root of neuroses.
Psychoanalytic work does not produce something new, but handles resistances to the
recovery of meaning. Interpretation20 makes resistances intelligible, but interpretation is
not the sole task of analysis, interpretations are made only to better work through the
resistances. For example, in “The Handling of Dream-Interpretation in Psychoanalysis”
Freud (1911/1958) warns that dreams have inexhaustible meaning and the analyst is
required to leave off the interpretation and trust that invariably there will be enough
material for analysis. Freud (1911/1958) writes, “I submit, therefore, that dreaminterpretation should not be pursued in analytic treatment as an art for its own sake, but
its handling should be subject to those technical rules that govern the conduct of the
and hermeneutics of desire, represents the self as dependent on desire for its existence and desire
dependent on existence for its manifestation.
20
Freud describes interpretation as a kind of translation, but Ricoeur prefers to think of
interpretation in terms of the production of intelligibility that is subordinate to an analytic
manoeuvre or technique. Ricoeur (1970) writes, “Thus analysis does not consist in replacing
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treatment as a whole” (p. 95). The desire for exhaustive interpretation may itself be a
delay, a form of resistance; a resistance to bringing the unacceptable to consciousness.
Interpretation must be subordinate to analysis as a whole. Working through the
transference, and not intellectual comprehension, is the central purpose of analysis. Thus,
the analysis need not stall at the reflective moment and circle too long generating
possible meaning or searching for definitive truth.
Psychoanalysis interprets the language of dreams, symptoms, slips and jokes and
in this sense the analysand’s psyche is narrated and understood by being read. Ricoeur
(1981) explains how it is the “deep kinship among all the compromise formations [that]
allows us to speak of the psyche as a text to be deciphered” (p. 256). Yet, all of the
objects of psychoanalysis are not textual objects. Psychoanalysis analyzes narrative and
the dynamics of narration, but the object of analysis is not literary insofar as human
existence is enacted and not just represented in language. Narrative is motivated and
aims to achieve certain ends. Discursive phenomena are derivatives of different ways of
being and acting in a world. Ricoeur (1974) writes:
It is only within the movement of interpretation that we apperceive the being we
interpret. The ontology of understanding is implied in the methodology of
interpretation, following the ineluctable “hermeneutic circle” … Moreover, it is only
in a conflict of rival hermeneutics that we perceive something of the being to be
interpreted. (p. 19)
ignorance with knowledge but in provoking a work of consciousness by means of work on
resistances” (p. 180).
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Conflicting interpretations signify a finite and unified being that is interpreted. Reflection
on what is other than reflection fixes being in narrative. Ricoeur explains, “Life’s ability
to freely stand at a distance in respect to itself, to transcend itself, becomes a structure of
finite being” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 9), while he goes on to say that “the relation of the
interpreter to his object becomes an ontological trait” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 10).
Psychoanalysis is a discipline whose method involves interpretation, but as reflection
brings to light the phenomena of consciousness the knowing of the thing itself is being
mediated by the narrative enacted in the analysis. Being is recognized by articulating it in
meaningful relations to others.
Ricoeur refuses semiological reduction of psychoanalysis to intellectual
interpretation and holds fast at the junction of force and meaning. Neither entirely
interpretive nor entirely empirical, Ricoeur (1970) sees psychoanalysis as operating by
way of a hermeneutics of phenomenology. Hermeneutic psychoanalysis aims at
deciphering expressions, but it also aims at understanding the unconscious understanding
that actively distorted the manifest meaning of expressions; that is, the reasons for the
distortion. Ricoeur would not go so far as to admit that the forces that shape meaning are
empirical objects in an independent external reality, but the distance between the
unconscious and consciousness makes the force of desire habitual and appear
mechanistic as if having causal effects. Desire is a force that drives consciousness, but
Ricoeur (1974) warns that the concept of desire cannot be grasped in and of itself without
risk of “creating a mythology of instinctual forces” (p. 21). Desire cannot be grasped
except through interpretation. It is by deciphering the semantics of desire that we can
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come to see desire as a force at the root of action. But this desire at the roots is not
directly accessible; it is only known by its derivatives, by its representations, as “Beinginterpreted”.
Ricoeur supports Freud’s use of mechanistic terms to describe the dynamics of
the psyche because such terms correspond to phenomenological experiences of alienation
from ourselves in the reflections of our being. He does not agree with Freud’s
expectations that the psyche will be thoroughly mapped in terms of these dynamic forces
and become the purview of the natural sciences, but he does agree that these mechanistic
terms are appropriate ways of describing the phenomenological experience of desire’s
expression. Ricoeur (1995) writes:
I do not reproach Freud for his mixed language in which the dimension of force and
the dimension of meaning are confronted and reconciled. Instead I defend this
hybrid language against hermeneutic “reformulations” that want to eliminate the
Freudian system of energies as well as against the physicalist interpretation, which
was that of Freud himself in line with the 1895 Project. (p. 190)
The tension between these two ways of reading expressions of desire, as
mechanical force and as meaningful intention, does not form a mutually exclusive
opposition, but a process that makes each visible in the reflection of the other21. Desire is
Freud only began the task of bridging the realms of force and meaning. It is in Ricoeur’s later
work that the dialectical synthesis of the mechanisms of force and the significance of desire
focuses more fully on the analytic relationship. Even in Freud and Philosophy (1970), Ricoeur
tended to overestimate the importance of the metapsychology and the psychic topographies as the
place where force and meaning interpenetrated. In 1981 Ricoeur writes of how, “it is the complex
character of the actual practice which requires the theory to overcome the apparent contradiction
21
135
a cause that anticipates. The force of desire anticipates a succession of figures to follow
and pushes meaning along ahead of itself. Ricoeur (1974) writes that, “The appropriation
of a meaning constituted in the past presupposes the movement of a subject drawn ahead
of itself by a succession of figures each of which finds its meaning in those to follow” (p.
161). Reflecting on desire’s history develops an understanding of the promise of desires
fulfillment; awareness that was not available in the beginning comes in the end. Just as
we are driven by desire, meaning emerges from recounting desire’s history. Ricoeur
(1974) explains that the most difficult aspect of a dialectical hermeneutics is that “the
two readings in question cover exactly the same field” (p. 118). They are inversions of
one another, juxtaposed, parallel, and mutually occurring, but differentiated by their
being narrated.
It is the tension consequent to the non-coincidence of the hermeneutic and the
phenomenological positions that releases being into meaning. The truth does not reside in
one position or the other. Truth does not reside in any position, but is recognized when
articulated across a tension of difference. Ricoeur (1974) writes, “There are indeed two
types of hermeneutics. One is oriented toward the resurgence of archaic symbols and the
other toward the emergence of new symbols and ascending figures” (p. 117). Expressions
are meaningful because they possess these two vectors, one pointing at the force of desire
and the other toward desire’s expression of promise. In desire’s force is reflected our fate
and the repetition of our history, in desire’s expression of promise we can see how the
between the metaphor of the text to be interpreted and that of the forces to be regulated; in short,
practice forces us to think of meaning and force together in a comprehensive theory” (Ricoeur,
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history of our desire alludes to radical possibility and far-flung hope. In this way, the
figures of desire reveal the vagaries of human will. The force at the origin of our desire
and the purpose engendered by desire’s expression are not in opposition, but form a
dialectic. Where Freud shows how we are bound to our history, Ricoeur sees
superimposed an emancipatory movement as we narrate and recognize the progressive
synthesis of our being.
Ricoeur and Freud both begin and end with an opaque immediacy of being yet
both are suspicious of interpretation because the meaning of experience is continually
located beyond the immediacy of being. An immediacy that does not posses truth, but
yields the certainty of phenomena and the uncertainty of reflection 22. As psychoanalysis
is focused on excavating the origin of expression, its orientation is toward the dark,
toward what is hidden, and its project is to bring to light what works on us but to which
we are blind. The figures that emerge into awareness by being spoken hold promise, but
how they unfold in their particularity will only be known upon reflection. Again we are
blinded to our desires and what may come. As an understanding of the origin of our
desire gives rise to the movement of deciphering, the origin becomes an end which then
again becomes an origin. Exhaustive reflection is impossible; something always remains
unconscious, as the reflected becomes shadow in the process of reflecting.
In practice, psychoanalysis not only interprets the psyche, but also manipulates
the forces of the unconscious by handling resistances, managing the transference, and
1981, p. 258).
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abstaining from satisfying desires. A psychoanalytic object is not an empirical object,
nor, strictly speaking, is it a hermeneutic object; rather psychic objects manifest
discursively and draw on elements of experience while also being meaningfully
interpreted. Psychoanalysis does not become natural science because as meaning
mechanically reduces to the force of desire, there is a parallel transcendent movement of
reflection that reveals the intention of existence. Phenomena are seen to originate in the
dynamics of the analytic relationship from unconscious drives while also promising
possibilities, meaning, hope, and the potential to communicate and accept one’s being in
the world. Ricoeur (1974) writes, “All of psychoanalysis speaks to me of lost objects to
be found again symbolically” (p. 20). Psychoanalysis is concerned with the meaning and
meaninglessness of personal history; meaning that is not directly accessible, but which
must be arrived at by working through fantasy and illusion. The phenomena of
psychoanalysis are both the ground for and the consequence of a way of being in the
world.
Domination or Veracity
The power of psychoanalysis seems to lie in its ability to understand and explain
the force of desire, reproductions of meaning, and the debt of expression to
intersubjective reality. The difference between contemporary Freudian theory and
practice and mainstream methods of psychotherapy may be seen as the difference
between patience with being in contrast to the prescription of being. Freud is not hoping
Kaufmann (1980) reminds us that one of Freud’s favourite sayings was: “One must be able to
endure some uncertainty” (p. 101).
22
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to shape action, but describing what relationships demand of us. Freud explains the
production of one’s being in the world and the processes that break down those
productions. Unlike contemporary models of therapeutic assessment and practice, instead
of making atemporal claims about treatment method, psychoanalysis works with ways of
understanding while dispossessing us of the conviction that the immediacy of
consciousness is in control of being. Instead of mastery over our being, the world a
psychoanalysis offers releases the grasp of the unconscious and promises greater
awareness of the effigies we use to express the tension of the psyche and the themes of
our lives.
A hermeneutic psychotherapy is what Ricoeur (1974) calls a “technique of
veracity” and not a “technique of domination” (p. 190). Such a therapy does not attempt
to master the mechanics of the soul, situations, or people, but rather intends to enter into
the meaning of human conditions to know existence better through the detours of desire.
The liability, however, is that a hermeneutics may become dogmatic in its rejection of
domination and unwittingly become a dominating technique. Ricoeur acknowledges that
psychoanalysts may fall into the trap of proclaiming assured knowledge, professing
expertise, and thus becoming a vehicle of domination. The need to believe that someone
knows the truth can push both analyst and analysand into “the subtleties of compliance”.
Phillips (1995) is also concerned with the risk of psychoanalysis becoming an
authoritative technique and losing its ability to express our suffering and our desires in
place of knowing what it is we suffer and desire. The authority of psychoanalysis and the
expertise of the analyst reside in the ability to know and accept the limitations of
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understanding; knowing that further along reflection will still bring greater awareness.
Traversing the possibility of expert, a hermeneutic psychotherapist adopts an objective
meaning that is an assumed requirement of the analytic experience and bound as a whole
to a form of life.
The problem of authority and expertise when psychotherapy is re-interpreted as a
hermeneutics is expressed by Ricoeur’s question: “How can thought that has once
entered into the revealing power of symbol develop along the line of rationality and rigor
that has been proper to philosophy from its origins?” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 287). With
expression always able to convey something other than what is immediately apparent,
what can be known for certain? At every point in the hermeneutic process, Ricoeur
insists on the renunciation of absolute truth. He (1960/1967) writes, “Renounce the
chimera of a philosophy without presuppositions” (Ricoeur, p. 19). Does reflection
paralyse knowledge with doubt and empty it of definitive significance? Understanding is
not meaningful and does not exist outside of a living dialectical process; therefore, from
the hermeneutic stance, knowledge may be tested for utility and consistency over time,
but it is only coherent, persuasive, or valuable in a specific temporal situation. All
understanding is positioned and chasing the foundation of an idea is a task without end.
At its best psychoanalysis is a critique of both the analyst’s and the analysand’s
desire which beguiles the notion of psychological phenomena as corrigible. Analysis of
the transference is an analysis of a person’s expression and belief in the object of their
desire. The force of desire cannot be independent of its incarnation and the
representations that manifest are not absolute, but continually change and shift depending
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on the dynamics of narration in which the representations emerge. Desire’s expression
cannot be known with absolute certainty, but in reflections between analyst and
analysand interpretations are recognized as true. In this dual role of reflecting and
analyzing reflections, the analyst takes leave of the ordinary notion of the expert and
sustains authority by her efforts to hold a reflexive/abstinent position of suspended
attention. Phillips (1995) writes of the authority of the analyst, “the psychoanalyst is a
professional who sustains his competence by resisting his own authority. The
unconscious, at least as Freud described it, is another word for the death of the guru” (p.
xvi). The central insight of psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic insight. There is no final
word, no definitive interpretation because understanding is always partial and depends on
more than a correct reading. Grosz (1990) writes, “Meaning is structured by more than
human will or intent. Psychoanalysis is the first system of knowledge (in this century at
least) to recognize the implications of the ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning utilized
by the unconscious” (p. 13). What the therapist says the patient is, or what the therapist
thinks the patient should do, cannot escape latent forces of desire. Meaning is always to
be determined and yet there is no escape from meaning constituted prior to our
consciousness. The dynamics of narration conveys understanding while continually
inspiring as yet unknown possibilities of meaning.
Conceptually, a hermeneutics is an open system not closed to further
development because something uninterpreted can always be discovered as an element of
the interpreted. In practice interpretation comes to rest on one formulation and not
another at least long enough to convey meaning, but in “Analysis Terminable and
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Interminable”, Freud (1937/1964) admits that analysis is never entirely finished because
it is limited by the situations that come up in analysis. Certain difficulties may not arise
in that particular analysis. However, in the circumstances that do arise the analysand and
analyst arrive at a mutual understanding of the unconscious. This is the point at which
analysis is terminated. Interpretation is finite insofar as understanding can be arrived at in
a relationship. An analysis takes on certain representations and not others. These
representations are the means by which what was unconscious is recognized consciously.
Ricoeur (1974) writes how the “realism of the unconscious is the correlate of terminable
analysis” (p. 104). The unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis is real insofar as it is
inseparable from the models of the psyche that organize the understanding of the
analysis. The realism of the unconscious, Ricoeur contends, is justified not just on
phenomenological grounds, but also because of its ability to organize a new field of
intelligibility.
Psychoanalysis as a technique of veracity makes it essentially an anti-technique
concerned with the hermeneutics of narration and not the domination of being. It is not a
technique for constructing narratives or behaviour for the sake of adaptation,
functionality, or efficiency. The psychoanalytic agenda is to go from lack of recognition
to self-recognition, and to reappropriate aspects of one’s existence that have been
alienated in secrecy and have become unrecognizable as belonging to oneself. Because
the work of psychoanalysis is entirely work within language, Ricoeur (1974) writes,
“There are no “facts” nor any observation of “facts” in psychoanalysis but rather the
interpretation of a narrated history” (p. 186). Observations of behaviour in analysis are
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not valuable as facts, but as expressions and changes of meaning that occur within a
patient’s history of desire.
Psychoanalysis deals with mechanisms, investments of energy, and economies of
desire across a hermeneutics of voluntary and involuntary action. Vested interests are
revealed as detours of narration necessitated by one’s history in concrete situations. The
result of this awareness is not the ability to use oneself better, but to understand oneself
better and to live better. We remain free to embrace our desire as our destiny. Ricoeur
(1974) writes,
The fiction of the absence of motivation, by which consciousness supports its
illusion of self-control, is recognized as such. The fullness of motivation is located at
the same place as the emptiness of the freedom of consciousness…No longer free
will, but liberation. This is the most radical possibility opened up to us by
psychoanalysis. (p. 192)
Awareness, understanding, and acceptance of unconscious conflict are the liberties
promised by the work of psychoanalysis. Ricoeur sees in psychoanalysis not just the
reduction of meaning to history, but also the possibility for meaning’s restoration in the
telling of history. The semantics of desire reveals an endless ability to express and
communicate. Interpretation in its attempt to exhaust meaning continues to generate
further possibility and render manifest realms of meaning not yet fathomable. Desire
always finds expression. Aware that even those desires that are secret are spoken, what is
can be recognized and released into meaning. In this way there is a liberation and release
of being through the efforts of reflection. Ricoeur writes of desire needing to be educated
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to what it is and to what it is doing. Thus not determination or satisfaction, but
recognition, acceptance, and the ability to communicate are the forms of liberation
Ricoeur sees in psychoanalysis.
Ricoeur takes from his reading of Freud the notion that human existence is the
desire to be in search of a path to being. A hermeneutic psychoanalytic approach does not
seek an objective moment of truth, but a lived relationship that betrays the compulsion to
tell and narrate the distension of the psyche into various topographic representations. It is
not the insertion of a structure or the addition of a phenomena, rather it is the awareness
of lived being and the signs which come through in this living which open meaningfully
in therapy. Narrative stretches existence into the past regressively to reveal reasons and
causes of our behaviour and progressively into the future providing hope of new being
and the promise of possibilities.
Why did Ricoeur take up Freud?
Ricoeur’s interest in psychoanalysis stems from his earliest interest in the play of
the voluntary and involuntary in the realm of human action. In the Symbolism of Evil
(Ricoeur, 1960/1967) the stories of guilt are seen to have both reductive and restorative
effects; at once reducing will to a foregone conclusion while also revealing desires and
engendering hope for the future. The resolution of this antinomy continues in Ricoeur’s
work with psychoanalysis. Ricoeur explains that he initially took on Freud and Freudian
philosophy because of his interest in the themes of will, ill will, guilt, and fallibility
(Ricoeur, 1995), but these initial concerns turned to an appreciation of psychoanalysis as
a hermeneutics of the semantics of desire. Ricoeur sorted out the difficult notion of how
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the ideas of energy, force, destiny and determination transform into meaning, choice,
freedom and indeterminacy. The place of that transformation lies, for Ricoeur, at the
intersection of desire and language (Ricoeur, 1970, p. 395).
Ricoeur’s study of the creative tension between will and destiny finds extension
in Freud’s intersection of force and meaning in expressions of desire. Ricoeur’s longstanding study of the dialectical constitution of human action as both bound and free is
elaborated in his reading of psychoanalysis. Ricoeur sees in psychoanalysis the crossreferencing of force and meaning, desire and intention, motivation and purpose, and the
possibility of a mixed hermeneutics that is both finite and foundationless. He uses
psychoanalysis to show how a hermeneutics can reduce understanding to an explanation
of origins, but also recognize understandings with new and original depth. Ricoeur is
interested in the interface of polarities, the ability of polarized concepts to connect
without dissolving differences. Ricoeur writes (1970), “That point is where the positing
or emergence of desire manifests itself in and through a process of symbolization” (p.
65). His interest in the mystery of creation is focused on the liminal space of intersecting
interpretations. A Ricoeurian hermeneutics incorporates the tension between the nearly
infinite and timeless character of understanding and the definitive interpretations that
make the play of meaning possible.
In Freud and Philosophy (1970) Ricoeur succeeds in reading psychoanalysis as
hermeneutic phenomenological process. As emphasis shifts to highlight the creative and
not just the imitative nature of interpretation, Ricoeur demonstrates how we can account
for the liberating awareness that emerges in a psychoanalytic relationship. A central issue
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in Ricoeur’s thesis is the hermeneutic possibility for psychoanalysis to be a practice
whereby untold ways of being are recognized as meaningful expressions of desire.
Psychoanalysis is hermeneutically circular. It unearths secret desires hidden in the
distorted expressions we make of our lives and when a story is spoken there is meaning
inherent in the words used. The subject is divulging the fact that they are culturally
embedded; their language is part of an inheritance. So not only is the recounting of
experience a discovery of the interpolation of preconscious desires into the text of
consciousness, but at the same time it is the transmission of an abundance of culturally
pre-constructed mytho-poetic meaning. Understanding phenomena of existence is not
simply a reduction through a reflective analytic process. The analysand’s being in the
world is also constituted as the analyst recognizes what the patient is saying. As desires
that position us in existence are expressed, a recursive advancement of meaning is
formed in successive innovative interpretations. Understanding the juxtaposition of the
fate and wilfulness of desire can liberate being.
Ricoeur (1974) calls psychoanalysis “an adventure in reflection” (p. 161) and
claims it is reflective philosophy. Psychoanalysis unearths and reflects upon phenomena
of existence in order to understand and constitute meaning as historical being. Suspicious
of the manifest meaning of things, psychoanalysis de-centres consciousness as the origin
of meaning and takes up the task of becoming consciousness. The phenomena of
consciousness reflect both the origin of desire and the intent of desire. Paralleling
Ricoeur’s more general theory of hermeneutics, manifest and latent meaning in
psychoanalysis are distinct, just as reflection and phenomena do not coincide. Both Freud
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and Ricoeur agree that consciousness does not possess itself. Our expressions do not say
just what we think they say because all phenomena extend beyond themselves into the
opacity of existence and the multiplicity of meaning. Immediate consciousness holds an
unquestionable certainty, yet it is doubted because communicating intentionality is
partial and always makes the immediate significance of being full of other meaning.
Ricoeur teaches the lesson of releasing understanding from all avarice with regard to
itself and instead recognizing that meaning is continually lost and recovered in existence.
The language we use to express our being must be understood in terms of the force of
desire and the promise of veracity.
A hermeneutic reading of psychotherapy abandons faculty psychology for a
theory of signification. Accounts of existence, laws and norms of human behaviour,
theories of personality, therapeutic procedures, psychiatric systems of diagnosis, patient
symptoms, and presenting problems are all symbolic avowals of a world that transform
those avowals in processes of communication. These narratives in psychology are
cultural monuments that conceal the disavowed and hold out hope and promise. A
hermeneutic psychology begins with these narratives, with the explanations and the
understandings, instead of ending with them. Starting with what is avowed, with what
demands to be said, the task of a hermeneutic psychotherapy is to look at what is behind
and what is in front of these avowals; to elucidate the disproportions and dynamics that
structure the understandings, as well as the new ways of being in the world and the
grounds for hope that the understandings convey. This is not a normative psychology
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trying to assert truth, but neither is it merely descriptive. A fully hermeneutic approach to
psychotherapy is an interpretative enterprise rooted in existence.
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CHAPTER FOUR: NARRATIVE HERMENEUTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY
Introduction
The practice of psychotherapy tends to be regarded with a mixture of disbelief
and hope. A tacit lack of confidence in mere talk as a force substantial enough to
alleviate psychological pain, contrasts with the way people turn to psychotherapy in times
of mental anguish. So far in this dissertation we have considered the psychological in
terms of desire and examined the force of narrative to renew meaning. Beginning in
chapter one with Ricoeur’s early work we considered the hermeneutics of will, fallibility,
and desire in terms of their voluntary and involuntary aspects. An historical ground of
philosophical hermeneutics was laid out in chapter two, and the claim that meaning
regenerates through representation was considered in more detail by examining moments
in the process of understanding. It was seen how ambiguities of meaning become
apparent in narrative yet narrative also renews the significance of existence. In chapter
three the theory and practice of psychoanalysis was reframed hermeneutically, and
psychotherapy was recast as a narrative hermeneutics and a valuable forum for dealing
with problems of meaning and understanding. The force of narration to transform
understanding was located in the ongoing dialogues of therapy that reflect on meaning.
In this final chapter I will not attempt to formulate a hermeneutic programme of
psychotherapy and psychotherapy research. This would counter my understanding of
hermeneutics as a way of being with another in a meaningful world. This chapter is not
about how to know another, but about the potentials of meaning that are realized by
engaging with another in practices of understanding. In the first section of this chapter I
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consider the hermeneutic implications for the practice of psychotherapy. I argue that the
interpretation of desire is central to the therapeutics of narration and it is at the peril of
understanding that we let alone meaning as a foregone conclusion. Only by reflection and
recognition can we hope to renew meaning and further understand our existence. Also in
this first section I address the dynamics of recognition and the hermeneutic effort to turn
from the anodyne of knowing toward the struggle of interpretations in the process of
reaching understanding.
In the second section of this final chapter I consider the hermeneutic implications
for researching psychotherapy. My approach in this section is to consider how a
hermeneutics of psychotherapy turns the issue of validating treatments (Dobson &
Khatri, 2000) into an issue of relationship and responsibility. It no longer makes sense to
consider responsibility in terms of demonstrated effectiveness of procedure and process.
The demand for numerical objectivity is recast as a hermeneutics of trust in which
psychotherapy promises hope and the psychotherapist promises responsibility.
Hermeneutics shifts the psychotherapy research agenda. Instead of being responsible for
evaluating practices in the effort to secure valid procedure, a hermeneutic approach to
research seeks to understand psychotherapy practices and becomes responsible for
holding open a space for reflection so the recognition of possible meanings can unfold.
The responsibility of the hermeneut is to resist devolving into the security of partisan
advocacy in lieu of narrating conflicts of meaning and forums of dialogue. Without there
being final knowing the responsibility of the therapist turns from evidence of
effectiveness to a promise of care and accountability.
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The Recognition of Desire in Existence
Psychotherapy is a widespread phenomenon well entrenched in modern culture,
but in an era of psychology that looks for unambiguous explanations of events and
technological treatments for cure, the question of meaning in psychotherapy can be left
aside as a forgone conclusion. A hermeneutics of psychology carefully tries to bring to
light the preconfigured meaningful existence that subtends our beliefs, values, and
assumptions. We learn from hermeneutics to take the liberty of questioning assumptions;
to question what drives their formation and to question what these assumptions hope to
achieve. This is not in order to replace one formulation with another in the search for
universal truth, but rather to allow the presence of one phenomenon to be understood
through the presence of another. In this process, the value of one interpretation can lose
the upper hand to the value of another because it is not the arriving at an interpretation
but the exchange of interpretations that is of hermeneutic value. Thus, the specific
outcome and process variables of therapy become subordinate to the dialogical
movement of interpretation that regenerates depths of meaning and returns possibilities
of being in the world.
On a hermeneutic account, psychological processes and outcomes are thoroughly
historical and existential, always meaningful and open to interpretation. Understanding in
therapy is not a reliable end assured by the following of proper procedure. Understanding
manifests by virtue of historical practices and social dynamics. The outcome of therapy is
not valuable by virtue of the therapeutic procedure itself, but because the practice of
psychotherapy is meaningful as a way of being in the world. There is no final division of
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better or worse outcome, but ongoing narratives of wellness and illness and the back and
forth exchange of interpretations, as we make sense of the phenomena we experience in
the course of engaging in therapeutic practices. It is with these assumptions that I take up
psychotherapy as a meaning making practice where the injunction of good and bad is
dissolved in a narrative understanding of cultural and historical desire.
Narrating Being
Psychotherapy seems to be a worthwhile endeavour held in esteem by its
recipients or patients23 (Mental health, 1995); although not as unequivocally regarded by
scholars who are disappointed by its unquestioned assumptions and lack of concern for
theoretical coherence (Martin, 1994; Smedslund, 1982; Sjoberg, 1982). I appreciate that
psychotherapy is generally valued by those who have participated in its practices, but also
appreciate the significant critiques made of its theoretical underpinning and weak or
absent cultural historical awareness. This contrast makes it clear that we do not
understand exactly how therapy is important or what it is doing. Despite a plethora of
psychotherapy research spanning several decades Martin (1994) points out “it remains
true that our understanding of how psychotherapy achieves its effect is underdeveloped”
23
I have chosen to use the term patient to refer to those who chose to undergo psychotherapy. I
recognize that this term connotes certain medical meanings. By using the term patient I hope to
reclaim the more archaic sense of the term as one who suffers another to know, one who
undergoes an action of another. At base, the conditions of psychotherapy are formed by a crisis in
which one cannot help oneself except by aid of another. Whether it is another person or another
self further along, the patient trusts in the action of another. This sense is preferred to the
theoretically narrow meaning conveyed by the term analysand and the consumeristic and
individualistic meanings conveyed by the terms client or more recently consumer.
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(p. 99-100). Of what significance are the practices of psychotherapy? Why bother
communicating one’s existence to a psychotherapist?
In the case of telling one’s tale to a therapist, psychotherapy is likely important
because it holds out hope for something better, but equally important it holds out hope of
being understood by another. A hermeneutics of psychotherapy can account for the value
of being understood by another or by oneself. Hermeneutics regards as fundamental to
the practice of psychotherapy questions of meaning and the search for understanding. It
can account for how communication, interpretation, and recognition generate worlds of
possibility that open up new meanings and ways of being. The telling does not merely
repeat existence, but exchanges existence for consciousness of the meaning of existence.
Although our lives, our thoughts, emotions and behaviours are already more or less
meaningful, representing experiences in narrative allows us to clarify what we mean; not
as a hidden significance that lurks behind existence, but as something that is everywhere
around us, that is present in its immediacy but goes unrecognized except for the
reflection on experience. Through this telling of how things are meaningful, narratives
form and reform the significance of existence and forge powerful relationships with our
being in the world. Narratives in therapy are the material of the past interpreted to form
an understanding in the present, such that the practice of psychotherapy is a hermeneutics
of narrative participating in circles of meaning that reflect back on themselves to form
new significance for the future.
A hermeneutic approach to psychotherapy is not a way of knowing and treating
patients but a living together in context of shared intersubjective meaning. A hermeneutic
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psychotherapy negates the possibility of the therapist knowing the timeless meaning of
the patient’s story. The truth of the patient is not known, rather a hermeneutic approach
to psychotherapy assumes a narrative way of being with, and relating to, another.
Listening to the life stories of another, the therapist need not assume to know the
meaning of the patient’s narrative but must seek to understand another. Knowledge of the
other, unlike understanding, might be used to justify the imposition of the therapist’s will
over that of the patient, but understanding is sought through losing oneself to a
relationship. With a hermeneutic approach to psychotherapy, the therapist and patient
share a meaningful world. This is a world that holds out hope for something other than
what is; perhaps relief from distress, increased awareness, or harmonious existence in
relationship to others with desires. Narratives are generated out of a dynamic interplay of
desire that always strives for something more, something better, and negotiates with other
desires to arrive further along. In lieu of providing steps for reaching the object of the
patient’s desire, a hermeneutic therapy seeks to recognize desire’s meaning.
Understanding depends on existence communicated in the narration of events.
The therapist understands the patient according to her own investments in ways of being
in the world. As such, she reflects on phenomena mediating the relationship that is her
own existence. As the therapist recognizes the patient and her position in relation to that
existence, the speaking of life experiences becomes more than a representation of one
life; reflected in the audience of another semblances can be discerned, signs, forgotten
meaning, hopes, purposes and new avenues of possibility come to light. A renewed sense
of things returns to enrich the significance of the patient’s existence. We become aware
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of our being and possibilities of becoming as consciousness presses against a meaning,
against something other than what it is. By communicating with another our talk reveals
further significance while still bearing witness to what was as well as to occluded
possibilities of what could be.
Ambiguities Beyond Opposition
The encounter of therapist and patient forms a tension that may generate new
meaning and dispel stagnation in a resourcefulness that stretches beyond the struggle of
wills. Differences of interpretation can be regarded as necessary for the narrative
generation of understanding. Recognizing one interpretation in terms of something
different is basic to the process of understanding. This approach lays the ground for
recognizing the involuntary dynamics that drive existence. Recognition can then
transform the involuntary “givens” into a backdrop for voluntarily understanding.
Likewise recognizing desire liberates oneself to desire. The interdependence of what is
with what is not need not form a permanent impasse, but rather can set in motion a
struggle for a meaningful existence as one desire is recognized through another and one
will is constituted in dialogue with another.
In psychotherapy there are several ambiguities that offer opportunities for further
understanding. The world of the patient encounters the world of the therapist, the past is
faced by hopes for the future, and the meaning of actions is met with the meaning of
words. Essential to the generative capacity of a narrative hermeneutics is the presence of
these discrepancies and the recognition of one thing in terms of another. Acknowledging
the value of indeterminacy replaces the tendency for the opposition of right and wrong.
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When desire meets what it is not, that difference provides opportunities for recognizing
what is. It is not the being of one thing or the other that is important for recognition, but
the communication of desire through its analytic encounter with another that brings the
meaning of being to life.
Success for hermeneutic psychotherapy involves the narration but not the
dissolution of differences. A hermeneutic psychotherapy embraces paradox of meaning
and irony of contradiction by generating a story of the difference instead of a definitive
solution that solves the ambiguity. A contradiction need not be logically erroneous
because the temporal character of a narrative hermeneutics allows the necessity of one
existence to pass into the necessity of the next 24. In effect this opens possibilities of
meaning, instead of limiting being to the stagnation of one position without another.
Failure is not defined in terms of the logical incoherence of the meaning of symbols, but
is consequent to the positing of absolutes; where the pain of difference not only makes
existence known, but also incapacitates communication and thereby negates the
conditions necessary for understanding. A narrative understanding of one thing as another
does not eliminate discord but generates new possibilities from discordance.
The story is oriented beyond the experience it expresses as it says something
about something, and is understood in terms of something else, it also provides the call to
move beyond the presence of where one is. Meaning is located neither in existence nor in
24
The law of contradiction states that a sentence and its denial cannot both be true. However
important this law may be when defining truths and formulating proofs, its importance diminishes
when narrating meaningful experience. Across time both A and not-A can be true and form a
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the narrative, but in the understanding that transcends the limits of the given and reaches
across differences of interpretation to communicate something more 25. Instead of
working with extremes of absolute or indeterminate meaning, a narrative hermeneutics
takes the communication of desirous existence as a medium of representations which
opens life into realms of possibility that otherwise remain unrealized.
The Therapeutics of Narration
Psychotherapy works with narrative representations of being. Narratives of hope,
fear, and desire become the subject of conflicting interpretations. In reflecting on life, the
presence of living is abandoned for the uneasiness of seeing what is and what ought to
be. Past, present, or future desire goes unrecognized until it is pronounced in reflection
and suffered as regret or anticipation, confusion, uncertainty or lack. Narratives tell what
is not told in being but what ought to be. The narrative sunders being into what is, what
was, and what might be. Identity with narrative is, thus, a sundered identity removed
from one’s being in the world. Reflection brings existence to light and knows its being as
a desirous being both lacking and having, but not uniform onto itself. It is filled by
conflict, resistance, the dialectics of desire, the ambiguities of wanting the forbidden and
not wanting the permitted.
So what is the value of communication? Why talk and not be silent? If it is
through narrative’s reflective function that the ambiguity of desire is made manifest, then
larger narrative identity. So for example, we can depict Paul Ricoeur as both a pacifist and not a
pacifist and still coherently speak of the same person.
25
There is no permanently determinate meaning to life or to any existence. It is only when
reflecting on existence that our communications lead to an awareness of meaning.
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it might seem that by avoiding communication we could preclude reflection and so
eliminate the suffering of our desire. But the hermeneutic moments in the process of
understanding are heuristic, not metaphysical realities. Strictly speaking we do not reflect
on being, but as a society we are reflective beings and our reflections can reveal our
desire for existence and non-existence through the receptive audience of another. In
conscious life there is no escaping the fracturing of being in the light of awareness;
neither is there any escaping from desire’s expression. Psychoanalysis demonstrates that
even when we are not consciously aware of it our wishes are involuntarily spoken in
dreams, jokes, fantasies, and symptoms. Freud (1905/1953) tells us that,
There is a great deal of symbolism of this kind in life, but as a rule we pass it by
without heeding it. When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human
beings keep hidden within them, not by the compelling power of hypnosis, but by
observing what they say and what they show, I thought the task was a harder one
than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that
no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent he chatters with his fingertips;
betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. (p. 77-78)
The Therapeutic Narration of Desire
A hermeneutic argument for psychotherapy proposes that the ambiguity of desire
seeks more than expression and more than the other; it seeks communication and haunts
existence in search of recognition by another. The patient comes not only to be cured but
also to be recognized by another. Providing an object, or more likely a substitution for the
object that is desired, can satisfy the search for recognition because the presence of the
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object is an acknowledgement of the presence of a desire. The patient does not seek to
communicate with a therapist for the sake of satisfaction. For the most part, there are
more direct ways of satisfying desires than by going to therapy. The patient speaks to a
therapist for the sake of being heard, recognized, and understood and not to be satisfied
per se. As such the therapist who tries to help becomes oppressive. Advice and guidance
misses the meaning of the communication and violates the dignity of suffering in quick
pursuit of fixing the other to normalcy. In desperate hope for something better further
along the demand for normalcy requires repression of ambiguous interpretations and the
diversion of the simultaneity of desire and disgust into acceptable expressions for the
sake of another. The pathological is an experience intolerable to the ego because it
signifies the absence of something else, the possibility of nothing, and our vulnerable
hope for the presence of anything else.
The hermeneutic psychotherapist oriented toward the meaning of signs does not
shrink from recognizing expressions of desire and its ambiguities, but works with the
force of desire’s search for recognition. Recognition does not eliminate ambiguity but
accepts desire as a fertile struggle with absence and the uncertainty of existence. When
the therapist presupposes to know what the patient desires the therapist appropriates the
being of the other as her own. This treatment of the other as one’s own speaks to the long
history of oppressive psychotherapeutic practices that perpetuate dominant ideologies of
the good and sane (Foucault, 1965). A hermeneutics of psychotherapy understands desire
as desire-for-being and the provision of desired objects as an exchange made in the face
of the desire to be. This being of the patient that comes before the therapist is recognized
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as incarnating desire; that to be human is to be a desirous being always somewhat
conscious of something other, anticipating and remembering what is not.
A hermeneutic psychotherapy does not loathe abnormality and does not seek to
enslave the disavowed in service of the dominant good. A hermeneutic psychotherapy is
not oppressive in its need for the heroic quest that will eliminate the presence of
otherness. Instead of perpetuating what is known, a narrative hermeneutics seeks to meet
what is unknown in the other and to interpret the other as reminiscent of oneself in the
drive for further understanding. A hermeneutic psychotherapy is a way of being with
difference that does not defy the mystery of the other by presuming to know what the
other is. We know what we have participated in. We know what relations demand that
we know, and whenever we know we exclude something else. The never-ending
narration of significance coheres the discordance of reflection and stills the spin of
interpretation without shutting down meaning. Communication has the power to relieve
conflicts of mind by accepting and making sense of ambiguities in a narrative unfolding
of understanding. Although there is not a predictable or permanent solution, only when
the disavowed desire is brought to consciousness and understood by another can the
tension of desire’s ambiguity hope to release and rest back into being.
Moments of attention, recognition, interpretation, and understanding characterize
a therapeutic interchange insofar as the exchange is generative of new meaning and ways
of being in the world. Divided against awareness, living with reflected fragments of
meaning that resist being, the gravity of the therapist’s recognition and understanding
pulls the disharmony of fragments back into a fuller presence of being. The experience of
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distress is mediated by the therapist’s recognition of the patient, while simultaneously,
that recognition intimates something more than what it represents 26. The recognition ties
one existence to another and in the meeting of minds there is an understanding that can
have the effect of returning a new meaning to the patient’s immediacy of being.
The Hermeneutic Cure
Desire as a tension of the wanted and unwanted can be recognized by the mind’s
reflection on being. A hermeneutic cure 27 can be thought of as relieving distances across
levels of consciousness by binding existence with reflections on existence. A
hermeneutic cure offers to recover meaning and make sense of uncertainty without the
tyranny of a hermeneutics of care that insists on right belief and obedience to procedure.
There is no betterment of being ensured by coercing one into the confidence of another.
A hermeneutic cure is the cure of communication without final meaning. It is the risk of
reflection, the exchange of interpretations, the push to relinquish absolute certainty of
meaning, and the hopeful embrace of something new. In lieu of the assurance of right and
wrong, one is educated to a meaningful awareness of being28. A hermeneutic cure is not
an anodyne for consciousness but seeks to relieve suffering through the inauguration of
meaning.
26
Later in the context of hermeneutic research, I will return to this issue of what Benjamin (2000)
would call the “thirdness of recognition” (p. 52).
27
Cure in this sense is the recovering of meaning and making sense of uncertainty in the return to
a meaningful existence.
28
Krisiteva (1987) explains the joy of recognition, “Gravity becomes frivolity that retains its
meaning of suffering and continues its search for truth in the joy of perpetually making a new
beginning” (p. 51-52).
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When there is only the one awareness without another, or only reflection that
illuminates difference without understanding and further meaning, then cure is more akin
to the process of stabilizing compounds than caring for another in a process of
transformation. Unsundered states of awareness are not held to be superior to the
awareness of reflection. Likewise the revelations of reflection are not superior to
absorption in being. Being, awareness, and reflection animate understanding; no one state
is held to be superior to another. It is the circulation of one to the other that engenders the
vitality of a meaningful existence. In being there is the desire to know; in reflecting there
is the desire to be. Each moment is partial in its approximation of the whole of what we
are. By narrating the human psyche suffering can be acknowledged and transformed into
meaning.
The agenda of a hermeneutic psychotherapy is to provide a forum in which
existence can be spoken and recognized by another. It is a therapeutics that advances the
vitality of being, not by judging and manipulating consciousness to a desired end, but
through greater understanding and awareness of possibilities. Fantasies of radical
independence along side an aching desire to belong and be with another form dynamic
struggles for meaning. Symptoms signify narratives that mean more than what is
immediately portrayed. They tell a story of forbidden awareness, of ambiguous historical
relations, and speak to ways of living that make sense and seem worth having.
Symptomatic expression is turned into discursive possibility. The therapist listens to
recognize the story that is being communicated; not seduced into hearing only what is
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hoped for, not compromising one thing for another, but negotiating an understanding of
one thing in terms of another.
A Dialectic of Knowing and Not-Knowing
Understanding by way of reading one thing in terms of its resemblance to another
is an on-going process that necessitates a willingness to lose and regain meaning.
Acquiescing to this movement brings about an awareness of the dialectical enactment of
meaning. Instead of imposing knowledge onto the being of the patient in a presumptive
move to restrain pathology or promote wellness, a hermeneutic psychotherapy seeks to
read through the tension of right and wrong in the development of a narrative
understanding. Unearthing sedimented assumptions, a hermeneutics inquires where an
epistemology already knows. Although the posture of not knowing is a characteristic
feature of a hermeneutic approach, it does not rarefy this position into an ideal 29.
Beginning with uncertainty and moving toward understanding through the telling of a
story, therapy becomes a creative process that does not work to disavow existence in the
hope for something better, but returns to the disavowed in order to rediscover a desirous
existence enacted in the world. Knowledge is a kind of interpretation that serves as a
vehicle for understanding, an occurrence always passing into absence.
Understanding transforms its subject and so, to some degree, hermeneutics
resolves to not know the subject while also offering recognition. A kind of negation of
Benjamin (1997) warns of the tendency to grasp at positions. She writes, “Psychoanalysis has
objectified the other while idealizing its knowledge as objective, has paradoxically denied the very
subjectivity that must serve as the source of the analyst’s knowledge. However, the reaction
29
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the subject is vital to recognition and forms the condition for narrative dialogical
understanding. Benjamin (2000), for example, writes of the intersubjective turn in
psychoanalysis and explains the importance of interpersonal recognition in the
therapeutic relationship. When the dialectic tension collapses into one or another being
recognized, then there is what she terms breakdown or unassimilable difference. She
writes,
The analyst uses her subjectivity in the interaction in a way that shifts both her and
her patient’s emotional state; she shows a small edge of challenging alterity and so
exacts some tacit bit of recognition by the patient. Without that bit of recognition
from the other side, the wheel probably just won’t turn, and the slow rotation out of
breakdown cannot occur. (p. 50)
A hermeneutics of psychotherapy takes the knowing of the therapist as a vehicle for
communication and understanding; a moment in the hermeneutic circle. The therapist
speaks the rationale that she knows, which is reflective of her way of being in the world,
but the patient also speaks a way of knowing. Conditions are then conducive to
understanding one interpretation as akin to the other so that resemblances and differences
can be explored.
Only with the intersection and exchange of different worlds can a new quality of
understanding emerge. Diagnosis, for example, is a medical account of certain
phenomena but cognitive, social, mythological, historical, or biological readings can also
against this condition, which may tend to produce counter-ideals of not-knowing and mutuality,
must also be carefully deconstructed” (p. 781).
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be made. It is not, however, a matter of trying on or experimenting with different
discourses of understanding. The therapist offers interpretations from a place where she
knows what she is doing and believes in what she knows. She interprets from the world
she lives and breathes. What at bottom seems most valuable about communication is not
the telling of existence or the conveying of knowledge, but that being is made sense of by
another alternative way of being in the world. A discourse of diagnosis at variance with
another discourse can make presuppositions, meaning, and values transparent. The
psychotherapist’s position embodies a potentially creative tension between enacting a
caring search for meaning and delivering an authoritarian message of knowing. Crucial to
a hermeneutic analysis is the therapist’s recognition of the limited role of knowledge in
the circle of understanding.
The Freedom of Recognition
A hermeneutic psychotherapy is not a panacea for desire. Making sense of
narratives spoken in therapy does not free the patient from frustration or conflict.
Narrative understanding gives the patient a way of accepting the difficult ambiguity of
what is, while also articulating a passion to continue to move beyond this uncertainty.
Merleau-Ponty (1962/1945) writes, “It is by being unrestrictedly and unreservedly what I
am at the present that I have a chance of moving forward” (p. 455-6). Liberation is not
the freedom to choose what one is or what one is not, but the freedom to be open to a
world of meaning that is both incarnated in one’s being and that, through narration and
communication, continually presents unforeseen significance. Understanding is
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emancipatory because it returns one to continue in one’s being; to manifest an
unpredictably meaningful freedom to be.
A hermeneutic psychotherapy does not seek to alter the manifest but can relax
into being because it can recognize desire in terms of the conflicting interpretations that
it generates. A hermeneutic psychotherapy does not rarefy knowledge at the expense of
communication, but instead shifts its focus from knowing to being with and knowing as.
One interpretation always occludes another, but it is possible to acknowledge this
occlusion and what is relinquished without doing violence to what is manifest. To be
with another requires respecting the limits imposed on their being, not violating the face
of the other as Ricoeur might say, while also acknowledging and accepting the
possibilities of limitations.
The regeneration offered by a hermeneutic psychotherapy is a function of
recognizing what is difficult to speak30. A hermeneutic therapist does use her knowledge
of the other as a justification for the imposition of desire, but instead offers
interpretations of what existence demands in the continual presence of being, awareness,
and understanding. To understand someone brings another into a presence of being. No
longer a stranger to herself, the patient can name what she means as she is recognized by
another. Therapy offers the opportunity to hear what one is saying in gestures, dreams,
Freud (1910/1958) writes, “Psychoneuroses are substitutive satisfactions of some [drive] the
presence of which one is obliged to deny to oneself and others. Their capacity to exist depends on
this distortion and lack of recognition. When the riddle they present is solved and the solution is
accepted by the patients these diseases cease to be able to exist. There is hardly anything like this
in medicine, though in fairy tales you hear of evil spirits whose power is broken as soon as you
can tell them their name - the name which they have kept secret” (p. 148).
30
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and symptoms; to hear what is twisted in consciousness in efforts to disavow the
inadmissible. A hermeneutic freedom is the freedom to recognize and to be recognized.
To paraphrase George Orwell (1946), if liberty means anything at all, it means the right
to tell oneself what one does not want to hear. A narrative hermeneutics of the psyche
makes sense of how we destroy what we love, how we create what we hate, how our filth
represents our cleanliness, and our purity our transgression.
Psychotherapy works with the historical constructs of experience as products of
being31. The therapist listens phenomenologically, reads hermeneutically, and
understands ontologically. Listening to talk reflective of being liberates a space in which
to enact oneself, and have aspects of the self recognized that might otherwise be
interacted with, but not consciously acknowledged, as meaning something more than
what is present. The hermeneutic therapist communicates not to recognize an objective
world, but to represent another with whom she is connected and to whom she can
communicate because of a common existence. The therapist takes up the phenomena
manifesting in therapy not only in their immediacy, but also as belonging to a history that
speaks a desire. This second meaning is neither the aim nor the conclusion of the first.
Interpretation does not aim at a second interpretation, but aims at understanding. A more
robust historical understanding is not a final conclusion, but partial, and may still be
interpreted again by another.
A Recreative Therapeutics
In this sense psychotherapy is not constructionist but “productivist”. It is as Benjamin (1998)
writes, “ a matter of co-created interpretation and play rather than strict construction” (p. 592).
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A hermeneutic therapy configures the meaning of existence into a narrative
without knowing ahead of time the beginning, middle or end. This is a creative process
that re-makes life as intelligible, simultaneously signifying the unknown while also
betraying an indirect reference to a past intelligibility. Narrative presupposes a way of
being in the world that precedes the story but demands to be re-said. Events contributing
to the plot of a story are already meaningful events prior to any new revelation. Narrative
makes reference to an actual life that is meaningfully lived but which still has a plethora
of ambiguous and tacit meanings32. The arrangement of events in a story, what Ricoeur
calls emplotment, infuses the present with intentions and reasons that are historically
derived, but also innovatively regenerate meaning. This regeneration of meaning bears
testimony to on-going commitments, purposes, involvement in certain practices, the
struggle with particular conflicts, and the fight for what one believes. Narration also
articulates possibilities not available when one thing comes after another in the
unreflective ontology of being in the world. The meaning of one’s actions is renewed and
possibilities for alternative actions recognized, but while narrative “says being” it also
completes its course of meaning by revealing new references in existence. Life and the
narratives of one’s life do not perfectly match. Life manifests as narrative and even
without exaggeration the narrative is often more fantastic than existence because of the
Contrary to the cognitive perspective, Smythe (1992) writes that “from a hermeneutic
perspective, meaning is not a product of interpretation, but a precondition for it. Interpretation
does not proceed from an empty form to a meaning, but rather from meaning as implicitly
understood to meaning as more explicitly articulated” (p. 359).
32
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symbolic function of narrative. Narratives also manifest in life as existence incarnates
desire and hope.
A narrative hermeneutics transforms the ambiguities of desire as awareness of
unrealized possibilities of meaning become available in the process of appropriating the
proposed worlds that narration offers. Narrative points to a possible world, a world that
perpetually transgresses reality as it imitates reality. Therapy talk reveals the potential of
a world the patient could inhabit while simultaneously reflecting on the world she does
inhabit. Patient and therapist become aware of fears, prejudices, biases, interests, and
different ways of resisting the ambiguous conflicts of desire. The presence of life can
thus be known insofar as it is distanced from itself as it is spoken for another revealing
what is feared and what is hoped for. Recognizing being reclaims possibilities for being
at home with oneself. A meaningful history with divergent plans, purposes,
commitments, cares and concerns can be reclaimed as one’s own.
A narrative hermeneutics can work with beliefs, thoughts, and emotions as
expressions of a historical cultural existence. Mental phenomena arise from ways of
living in a meaningful world and do not support a clear division between knower and
thing-known. Instead, the division between subject and object is blurred toward an
understanding that is reflective of one’s history, one’s practices, and how one relates in a
world. Consciousness is the consciousness of a story. In this way understanding is not the
state of someone understanding something else, but more in line with the process of
communicating one’s existence as meaningful. There is no distance between thing and
thing understood such that one peers at the other to consider what it is; rather
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understanding requires the effort of recognizing one thing as like another. As Kathleen
Blamey (1995) writes, “Becoming an object of consciousness is best described not
through metaphors of the gaze, of contemplation, but through metaphors of exertion, of
overcoming obstacles and hidden forces” (p. 595). The therapist does not work to secure
knowledge of the other, but uses representations, metaphors, and analogies to approach
an understanding that liberates meaning through the recreative capacity of representation.
Therapy ends when the awareness of the therapist and the awareness of the
patient do not resist each other, but converge and reflection releases its grip on being. At
the end of therapy, talk may be more mundane and less emotionally charged as the
duality of listener/speaker is dissolved in understanding. The goal, however, is not to
have the patient adopt what is an acceptable interpretation for the therapist. The
hermeneutic therapist is not vigilant for correct meaning or right behaviour. The
therapeutic sessions are a limited forum of reconfiguring meaning. As the listening
recreates the telling, and the telling recreates the listening, only those expressions that
manifest in the therapeutic relationship are worked through to recognition, yet therapist
and patient come to a common understanding and the continuation of meaningful
existence is supported by this recognition. At its conclusion, therapy may have
reconfigured some difficult and baffling emotions in a way that renews commitments to a
meaningful existence. The narration of doubt and uncertainty can make confusion
understandable. Through another and for another, the patient understands and accounts
for meaningful experiences. Understanding dispels uncertainty not by eliminating one
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thing for another, not by the victory or domination of one thing over another, but by
approaching uncertainty as a field or condition for understanding.
In concluding this section on the features of a hermeneutic approach to therapy, it
should be clear that a hermeneutic psychotherapy does not endorse the idea that
experiences are made meaningful by their emplotment in a narrative. Narrative
hermeneutics is not a project of making things meaningful where before there was no
meaning. Rather, a narrative hermeneutics of psychotherapy furthers consciousness of
existence and provides a greater experience of a meaningful world. The hermeneutic
tendency to highlight the being of communication renews meaning through the sense of
another. A narrative hermeneutics does not endorse the compulsion to control experience
nor the meaning of experience. Narration articulates a greater sense of the whole so one
can return to be. Ultimately, there is no freedom from desire, freedom from struggle, or
ambiguity. The freedom of hermeneutics is the freedom of expression and understanding,
not the freedom from conflict but the freedom of conflict and the cycling renewal of
meaning. At most, a narrative hermeneutics hopes one can become comfortable with
striving, relax into desire, and embrace the ambiguous uncertainties of existence.
Hermeneutic Psychotherapy Research
The Problem
Once we take understanding as a function of being, knowledge becomes
particular and moral, not universal and disinterested. Although the presence of existence
may be perfectly certain, there is no vantage point from which practices and emergent
phenomena can be observed that makes their significance unquestionable.
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Hermeneutically, there is no position outside of being where knowledge is secure. One
must stand within a hermeneutic circle to grasp the meaning of what is understood. To
borrow metaphors from Merleau-Ponty33, meaning is an atmosphere not a thing. It is
something that we live and breathe. We cannot know it from the outside because
meaning is co-extensive with a history and ways of being with others. Standing outside
there is no way of understanding what is within. Hermeneutics, then, changes the
orientation of research. It does not seek to evaluate the practices of psychotherapy but to
recognize them. In lieu of objective pronouncements, hermeneutic research inquires and
narrates the meaning of our mental health practices to better understand implicit values
and tacit assumptions inherent to a desirous existence.
Narrative is the expression of an understandable world; to understand something
is to be located in a world where practices come to be and phenomena come to light.
Meaning is incarnate in social practices, cyclically transforming in its transactions with
other meanings. Once the clarity of meaning is recognized, counter-knowledges form,
and from this difference there can arise a dialogue and renewed understanding of the
meaning of our practices. Narrating the significance of mental health practices does not
have the permanency of objective knowledge, but recognizes intentions and brings to
light possibilities.
Meaning and Impermanence
Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) writes, “Sexuality, without being the object of any intended act of
consciousness, can underlie and guide specified forms of my experience. Taken in this way, as an
ambiguous atmosphere, sexuality is co-extensive with life” (p. 169).
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Taking assumptions seriously as empirical phenomena constitutive of a
meaningful world can further a social historical understanding of the values, intentions
and hopes of psychotherapy practices. Hermeneutic research in psychology fosters the
development of an historical awareness that retains the link between the past while
bringing to the present new possibilities of meaning. Interpretation as a vehicle for
understanding can be taken up as a research approach (Martin & Sugarman, 2001), but
trying to understand psychotherapy practices is complicated by the impermanence of
meaning.
Consciousness always represents something beyond itself. It is historical and
intentional, motivated and inspired by some vision while attempting to avoid some
anticipated harm. Only the alienated psychological reality, plucked from its milieu,
remains stable, disinterested and without the dynamics of desire or fear. Psychotherapy
research (Mental Health, 1995; Yalom, 1995; Smith, Glass, & Miller, 1980) that seeks to
establish the effectiveness and efficacy of psychotherapy takes the reliable prediction of
outcome and the establishment of unambiguous process as definitive of science-based
practice. However, universal claims quickly lose their applicability while becoming
sedimented as fact in a community of knowledge 34. A hermeneutics takes psychological
phenomena as forms of consciousness, recognized and understood in terms of how they
34
Weisz, Donenberg, Han, & Weiss (1995) write of the gulf that divides clinical practice and
clinical research. They list a series of articles spanning more than a decade that maintain
psychotherapy research is of little value to the clinician. When therapists are asked to evaluate the
usefulness of various forms of literature for their practice, research literature typically ranks at the
bottom of the scale.
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are narrated35. Meaning depends on how interpretations are communicated, pursued, or
renounced. It depends on an intersubjective dialogue where differences of interpretation
can be recognized as based in conflicting desires, desires which form on-going narratives
that make sense of the psychological.
The hermeneuts teach us how the distance required to know facts precludes the
ontological belonging necessary to engage in their meaning. The conviction that the right
research methodology can secure unbiased substantive knowledge of a psychotherapeutic
process or outcome neglects the ontological nature of understanding. By extension,
objectifying psychotherapeutic phenomena destroys the fundamental relation of
belonging to a world that makes psychotherapy meaningful. When the known is extracted
from the process of being it is extremely limited in its ability to acknowledge how things
are known36. The hermeneutic project of understanding psychotherapy seeks not to
complete our knowledge, but to keep it alive. All knowing is taken as partial and
impermanent, but these limits also speak to an infinitude of meaning and can further our
understanding as they enter into dialogue with another meaningful interpretation.
Hermeneutic research precludes final knowing, atemporal truth, or disinterested
awareness. It assumes a perpetual incompleteness of knowledge and embraces the partial
angle of knowing insofar as it signifies unimagined possibilities. Still, a hermeneutics
continually seeks to revitalize knowledge by re-establishing its connections to worlds and
35
See for example the James-Lange theory of emotions (1922) for an understanding of how
interpretation shapes the subject of interpretation.
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other investments in being. Understanding the practice of psychotherapy in terms of
meaning transforms psychotherapy research into an on-going investigation. Such research
addresses the purposes of our convictions, the intents, fears, hopes, and desires
represented by our practices without judging their universal correctness.
A hermeneutics of method can illuminate how method is mystified as a path to
truth, and inquire into the assumption that by following certain procedures one is assured
objective, atemporal truth. Porter (1995) terms this assumption “mechanical objectivity.”
He writes of the public rhetoric of science and how “objectivity derives not mainly from
the wisdom acquired through a long career, but from the application of sanctioned
methods, or perhaps the mythical, unitary “scientific method,” to presumably neutral
facts” (p. 7). This kind of methodological approach to truth is transparent as a narrative
with a context in a world of meaning. Traversing the abyss between thing and thing
known, method emerges as part of the ontology of understanding. Mechanical objectivity
is never entirely mechanical, but requires some experience of a world in order to be
carried out. In this sense a hermeneutic analysis is more thoroughly empirical than a strict
reliance on numbers because it takes experience, and the meaning of numbers, into
serious consideration.
Hermeneutic research assumes there is more to psychotherapy than ahistorical,
acultural processes and outcomes. Juxtaposing the appearance of practices with the
narrative explanation of their appearance forms a play of interpretation that does not
36
See for example Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effect of human kinds. In D. Sperber, D.
Premack, & A. J. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multi-disciplinary approach (pp. 351-383).
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enclose a position, but draws out a narrative understanding. Interpretations contribute to
the tension between what appears to be the case, while signifying something that remains
unknown. The meeting of the difference creates opportunities for on-going debate. A
hermeneutic approach to research pursues understanding neither through mechanical
methods of objectivity, nor through the tyranny of authority, but by reflecting on claims
to knowledge. Systems of knowledge are taken as practices that can be reflected upon to
generate narrative explanations. This process of knowing and reflecting on knowing
forms the dialogue of understanding.
The meaning of psychotherapeutic processes such as care, distress, or wellness
locates the world of the investigator within a meaningful world of psychotherapy. What
the psychotherapy researcher finds out by investigation is what goes without saying;
research brings to light what is experienced by existing in the world of psychotherapy.
The tension between detachment and belonging, the representation of meaning and
meaning’s impermanence, generates fluctuations essential to the possibility of
understanding. One’s inclusion in the world can be objectified and objectification of that
inclusion can be read as a history with purposes and possibilities. Ricoeur (1981) writes
of how the paradox of otherness is indispensable to an awareness of historical being (p.
61). Seeing how the past anticipates a future reveals the assumptions of psychotherapy
stretched into the time of narrative.
If the hermeneutic circle of experiencing, reflecting, and understanding is basic to
psychotherapeutic practices, then the hermeneutics of psychotherapy are also subject to
Oxford: Clarendon.
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this circle of interpreting. Psychotherapy has the peculiar property of engendering a
mixed discourse of the voluntary and the involuntary; we speak of the purpose of our
motivations and the force of our desire. If we take up the ambiguous nature of
psychological objects, then narrating the hermeneutics of psychotherapy, and not
outcome or process research, would seem to be a more appropriate to understand and
explain the psychotherapeutic practice of understanding. Taken in this way the
explanations of psychotherapy research are given temporal extension and not taken as
universally applicable truths of therapy. Research as inquiry into the meaning of
phenomena would come to replace a dysfunctional and nearly ruptured dialectic ruled by
either quantitative empirical research or personal testimonies of significance 37.
Hermeneutic Research as Dialogical Inquiry
Hermeneutic research mixes narratives of the objectified with narratives of the
meaning of the objectified and forms a creative tension of describing what has been
understood with understanding that description. This difference forms the condition for
the interdependent origin of meaning. Explanations formed methodically using surveys,
case studies, randomized controlled trials, and double blind crossover studies are
meaningful practices in themselves while also bringing to light the presence of
meaningful practices. Analyses applied in specific cases to well-defined narratives can
provide a sense of how and when certain practices are meaningful. Hermeneutic research
can bring historical cultural awareness to bear on generalizations, and thus, understand
37
Zeddies (2002) points out that hermeneutics offers an alternative to objectivism and relativism.
Instead of having a view of language in which language mirrors or creates reality, a hermeneutic
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universal claims as events in a larger story. Generalizations speak to the world in which
they are formed. They touch the reader because they link the reader to a historical and
cultural self-understanding and speak of meaningful possibility.
A hermeneutic inquiry of the practices of psychotherapy does not oppose
Naturwissenschaften and Geistesswissenschaften. It does not presume a strict division
between objective description and subjective meaning. Hermeneutic research works out
the connections between the subjective intentions and the objective requirements of
meaning by approaching one as suggestive of the other in a move toward a better
account, greater understanding, and, hopefully, the return to meaningful practices.
Neither the descriptive nor the meaningful is left aside in any consideration.
Hermeneutic research does not seek to establish atemporal knowledge of
psychotherapy processes and outcomes. Description and the communication of
description is not the entirety of a hermeneutics. Description belongs to a living
inheritance of meaning and it is this being that is continually interrupted through
reflection and recognition. Reflecting on being does not wed us to a mysterious realism
of existence. Ricoeur reminds us, “Language of giveness or even pregiveness is heuristic.
It is a means of creating a different perspective from which to view things, a deliberate
forcing of issues so that current sediments are stirred up in order to discover other
possibilities” (Ricoeur, 1974, p. xix). Juxtaposing alternate narratives brings forth greater
significance. Descriptions of psychotherapy are descriptions of the sense of phenomena
that are meaningfully lived in a world. By interlocuting, instead of opposing, the duality
approach engages a serious dialogue between differing viewpoints.
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of description and meaning, hermeneutic research engages a dialogue that includes the
participatory ontology prefiguring any relations of understanding. A dialectical
hermeneutics that respects the mutuality of explanation and understanding provides space
for the imitative function of a hermeneutics to reappropriate meaning. A distanced
observation is not equivalent to a lived historical experience, but allows for the
possibility of recognizing a lived historical experience suggested by the observation. The
observation provides the distance needed to mediate knowledge, not as being, but
knowledge as understanding38.
With a Ricoeurian narrative hermeneutics we can see that the description of
psychotherapy mediates meaning because it can stand apart from the situation that
produced it. This autonomy means the description can be read in different ways. The
subsequent differences of interpretation, when recognized as limits of knowledge and not
as the destruction of knowledge, allows for critical reception, the potential generation of
new meaning and further understanding. Because of the dialectical character of a
narrative hermeneutics, narratives of objectivity need not be lamented as an “ontological
fall from grace”; the factual description is generative of greater understanding as its
separateness from being creates opportunities for interpretation (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 91).
The peril of this distance is that facts may stagnate in their detachment and become idols
of knowledge, forming an ideological defence against negotiation. On the other hand,
descriptions themselves are not arbitrary interpretations in the formation of historical
The observation or fact stands alone, but also betrays a history of “fact making” (see Smyth,
2001). The fact is the detail by which communication and understanding can occur.
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understanding. They are artefacts, intermediate between dogma and dialogue, as they
mediate possibilities of meaning. Narratives of objectivity such as descriptions, facts,
observations, explanations, theorems, laws, and generalizations inaugurate possibilities
of meaning because understanding is generated by way of communicating with such
explanatory structures. As long as the dichotomy of descriptive explanation and historical
understanding can be overcome, the generative function of narrative can be realized.
Although we can say with relatively little risk that efforts to understand practices
of psychotherapy must be carried out within the world of those who are making claims to
knowledge, becoming engaged in the world of another cannot be formalized into a
procedure of knowing. Hermeneutics is not a practice that one assumes, but involves
being, and a way of relating to being, and to beings (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 44). A systematic
account of a general approach to hermeneutic research might be made, but risks having
the depiction used as a guide and mechanically followed for assurance of right
meaning39. In this case the account would override the communities involved and the
style of communication that emerges spontaneously from conversations. With this caveat
in mind, my intention in what follows is to provide some examples of how research
might unfold based on some of the insights gleaned from the works of Ricoeur and
Freud.
39
Ironically, there is a recent tendency in applied medical hermeneutics to formulate research
methodology based on the insights of hermeneutic philosophers (Geanellos, 2000, 1999;
Robertson-Malt, 1999). However, making method of hermeneutics loses its central reflective
tendency to unearth the meaning of social practices including methodological practices.
Hermeneutics promotes a dialogical way of being in the world, but cannot formulate this being
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Psychotherapy research has the tendency to develop assumptions along the same
lines as the therapy that is the subject of the research. For example, cognitive therapy
research determines reliable and predictable events based on evidence in the same way
that the patient is persuaded to look for evidence of dysfunctional beliefs (Beck, 1976;
Smith, Glass, & Miller, 1980). Narrative therapy research externalizes the problems of
research, determines which narratives are supporting the problem, and constructs
alternative narratives that support alternative, less problematic research methods (White,
1997, 1995; White & Epston, 1990). In this sense therapy and therapy research are
extensions of one another. They belong to the same world of meaning while covering
different fields of inquiry. Hermeneutic research and psychotherapy do not amass
information into generalizations, nor construct more functional narrative representations,
but seek to understand the interests of therapists and patients. The first task of
hermeneutic research is to identify practices of importance to therapists and patients.
What does a psychotherapist desire to experience? What do patients desire to experience?
Before, after, or during therapy?
Psychotherapy research works with the dramas of human existence. The task is
for the researcher to enter into the drama of the phenomenon under investigation. Not
prematurely holding a world at a distance for the sake of objectivity, nor belatedly
reflecting on the meaning of a world. To paraphrase Gadamer, the horizon of the
question meets the horizon of the answer. To research for the purpose of understanding,
into a method of knowing without losing the creative liminal space that is possible by virtue of the
non-coincidence of being and knowing.
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the researcher must live with the question and embody the consciousness of the answer
until it becomes a way of being. Having entered a hermeneutic circle, the researcher can
inquire into the meaning of the answer as manifest in particular social practices, and
recognize certain meanings without destroying the possibility of others. The researcher’s
stance is neutral, not in the sense of taking up a neutral position of observing and
interpreting, but in terms of working to overcome her resistance to fully engage in an
unknown world.
At this point the researcher will become affected by the other she seeks to
understand. The risk is that instead of formulating reflections and offering
interpretations, she may either become lost to the other or, in a struggle to maintain a
semblance of her identity, she may seek to dominate the other. Hermeneutically the
practice of understanding has stalled at the moment of the phenomenological. Conflicts
of interpretation and the potential for new meaning and greater understanding are
forfeited for one position or another. Instead of the exchange of interpretations and the
furthering of understanding, one thing dominates in the presence of the other.
An example of a hermeneutically oriented investigation is found in the doctoral
work of Anderson (2000). Her research involves conversations with women
psychotherapists who have had painful experiences as patients in psychotherapy. She is
interested in the concepts of power and boundaries in psychotherapy, as informed by
feminist, post-modern, phenomenological and narrative literatures. Anderson conversed
with women who had experienced being both therapists and patients. She found these
women did not speak in ways suggesting that boundary violations were central to
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experiences of harm, but rather unresponsiveness, threats of abandonment, denial, and
defensiveness on the part of the therapist characterized the narratives of painful
experiences in psychotherapy. Anderson understood from this exchange that dismissing
or denying another’s experience was central to the violation of a therapeutic relationship.
In this way a hermeneutic analysis of the encounter of one world with another exchanges
positions to form an agreed understanding that brings to light new meaning of the
phenomena under question. The liminal space of intersecting narratives is fertile for
understanding. The researcher does not circumvent the interests that shape knowledge
and interpretations, but through a progressive exchange of interpretations, beginning with
surface interpretations and moving toward deeper more inclusive interpretations,
researcher and participants can inquire into the assumptions of each other’s positions and
come to a new understanding.
The idea that conversation can generate new meaning is common among
hermeneutic thinkers. Shotter (1993a, 1993b) writes of knowing a third, a third that is an
emergent phenomena of conversation. Ogden (1994) writes of the analytic third and the
generation of a third subject through conversation. Gadamer (1960/1988) explains how
conversation generates a subject independent of the will of its participants. He writes,
“We say that we “conduct” a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the
less its conduct lies within the will of either partner…we fall into conversation”, and
later, “a conversation has a spirit of its own” (p. 383). Zeddies (2000) explains how
“individuals do not actively shape the course of a true conversation (i.e. one that is not
coercive or presumptive) as much as they are carried along by it and are shaped
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themselves along the way” (p. 7). And finally, Benjamin (1998) writes of the generation
of “the third space as similar to following a musical score upon which we improvise…it
is thus a transitional process that appears as both invented and discovered” (p. 593).
The Recognition of Meaning
Interpretations are not valuable because they are possessed, but valuable by virtue
of their recognizing significance, which is only realized by their exchange. An
interpretation does not stand on its own. Interpretations are part of a way of being in the
world, linked to practices and ways of understanding. Objectivity is bound to a way of
life that has certain relationships with others. It is by trying to understand interpretations
that we can engage with the meaning of a world. Thus, knowledge, information, and
method are subordinate to the process of understanding as a whole. Struggling to
recognize and understand one interpretation in terms of another is the central tendency of
hermeneutic research.
In the search for answers, hermeneutic research does not organize interpretations
into universal explanation. Explanations are taken as interpretations that can illuminate a
history 40. The connection between understanding and being is manifest in the
relationship of question to answer. Although questions seek answers, it is the meaning
that is animated consequent to the relationship between the question and the answer that
transforms existence, and not the answer in isolation. Explanations are understood not in
40
Paradigms of doing and not of knowing in psychology are highlighted in an article by Mary
Smyth (2001). She illustrates how the academic literature of psychology tends to present the
process of fact making and not the end result of this process, the autonomous fact without origin,
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and of themselves, but through difference and resemblance to other explanations as each
becomes understandable in the reflection of the other. Meaning emerges when the force
behind a question meets its answer in another. Explanations are invested with a history of
desire that transform the other and holds out hope and promise for a future. Explanations
engender differences of interpretation while assumptions can be narrated and suggest
other meaning. Narratives are articulated not in order to get at the truth or merely to
describe the actual, but in order to move understanding further along. A narrative that
rests back into meaningful being marks a narrative conclusion. When the speaker and
listener have fully exchanged interpretations they have narrated a common being in the
world. Of course other phenomena will come to light as other conflicts of interpretations
develop, but an interpretive approach signifies the promise of understanding and holds
out hope as questions are answered and possibilities realized.
Evaluating a Hermeneutics
A Hermeneutics
With a hermeneutic approach to the research of psychotherapy it does not make
sense to secure psychological laws for the purpose of reliably predicting the processes
and outcomes of a therapeutic relationship. When the meaning of practices and the
objects of inquiry are ambiguous, and shift their meaning according to investments in
ways of being in the world, how can we expect to determine objective and universal
significance? Hermeneutic research does not propose to ascertain timeless answers, but
or history. This phenomenon seems to reflect the tendency for narrative representation of
psychological objects.
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this does not mean that claims cannot or should not be made. Psychotherapy can be
questioned by inquiring into the historical and cultural forces that determine its practices.
In this case, knowledge of psychotherapy can be claimed precisely as it is limited by
these conditions of inquiry. Interpretation is a vehicle for understanding but does not
secure an unchanging fact of a psychological matter. Facts speak of existence and express
commitments to ways of existing in a world that is invested with meaning.
A narrative hermeneutic investigation of psychotherapy does not seek answers so
much as seek to engage the practice of inquiry and to search for ways of connecting with
tacit assumptions and unspoken meanings. The narrative hermeneutics of care, of helping
and being helped, of wellness and distress, arise from particular historical existential
meanings that manifest in the dialogues of how these meanings are experienced.
Interpretations are made not to arrive at conclusions for the sake of knowledge, but to set
the process of communication in motion with its play of part to whole; of known to
understood. Meanings are implicit in all forms of understanding, but these meanings are
not static; as if once we understood what was meant the matter would be forever
finished. Understanding is a process that requires asking and asking again, as new
discoveries recast old problems in a light that is relevant to present concerns.
These investigations seek to revisit the meaning of practices that have become
sedimented through repeated use to form understandings relevant to present concerns.
Without adopting a restrictive methodology, this research explores the significance of
psychotherapy as a social practice. Hermeneutics differs from process research in that
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these investigations do not intend to discover a priori underlying structures41. Systematic
cycles of questioning, explanation, and understanding would not be used to determine
essential elements of therapy, but to question the meaning of its identity and the
significance of its community values. Careful to avoid the chaos of setting every relevant
meaning on its head at once, hermeneutic research unearths sedimented assumptions to
revitalize the sense of what is important in psychotherapy.
Investigations of therapeutic validity miss the importance of psychotherapy
because the problems of psychotherapy are not problems of knowledge and truth, but
problems of meaning, values, and ethics. The meaning of psychotherapy is not a
determinable event in the same way that a physical, chemical, or biological outcome or
process seems to be determinable, reliable and predictable. The psychological is fluid
and continually represents something beyond itself (Danziger, 1997; Hacking, 1999,
Martin & Sugarman, 2001). The reflexive nature of the psychological means that
psychotherapy cannot reduce to the factors that produced it without coming up with
something more. There is no unmediated starting point from which to begin to
understand. One cannot step outside the circle of understanding onto a fixed ground.
Understanding is a force that influences the emergence of phenomena as well as
reflections on those phenomena. The point from which we start cannot be recognized in
itself, but must confront another and be understood as mediated by another reflection.
41
See for example the process research of Elliot et al. (2001) or Yalom (1995) for a rank order of
therapeutic factors.
187
The tension of positions is important to the vital process of recognition and
understanding. With only one position understanding stagnates into idols of knowledge,
and the turn of the hermeneutic circle is forfeited for the power inherent in illusions of
surety and the one right way of being. The perpetually unfinished quality of
consciousness applies to both interpretations in therapy and in research. The therapist’s
interpretation and the researcher’s explanation are mediums for understanding, not
understanding itself. Recognition is what is valuable in understanding another. The
quality of this recognition does not possess a knowledge that jealously defends its truth,
but instead lets go of all avarice and uses knowledge as a vehicle for understanding.
Narration can press experience to own its desire by linking existence to the context,
culture, and position of something else. Narration is not a recital of facts, but is animated
by concerns for ways of being in the world. The interested, and therefore interesting,
narrative is one that has an agenda, a hope, and is forwarding particular interests. A
narrative hermeneutic approach does not seek to divorce these interests from being in
order to arrive at a preferred narrative, or a more functional or unproblematic narrative,
nor to abandon a position to understand another. It ventures to accept the vitality of the
narrative as it is invested and seeks to recognize and understand the value and interests of
that story.
As the hermeneutics of the researcher become more integrated into the way of
being that is investigated, greater awareness of the historical and symbolic functions of
narrative becomes the basis for more appropriate questions. There is no procedure for
inquiry, nor is there an interrogation of subjectivity as object. The process is relational.
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The hermeneutic researcher must become lost to the experience, absorbed into being
with another while also reflecting on what she understands of this being. Heidegger talks
of the “interrogating being”, but within a Ricoeurian paradigm, hermeneutic research
works to maintain the distinction between interrogation and being42. This would ensure
that dialectic potentials of meaning could develop in the reflective action of questioning
the puzzling experience of being. Reflection as phenomenon and phenomena as
reflections then form a spectre of meaning that is unavailable when the one is statically
absorbed into the other. Ricoeur rejects knowledge as embodied in being and knowledge
as objective explanation and instead proposes a hermeneutics, a dialectic of
understanding and explanation that roots knowledge in the narrative process of distancing
knowledge from itself.
Truth or Responsibility
The meaning of psychotherapy is always advancing to something further, but this
does not mean that any interpretation will do. A narrative hermeneutics demands
responsibility and is itself thoroughly accountable. Interpretations are not invented nor
are they arbitrary, but neither can they be eliminated in the process of pursuing truth.
Interpretations are a vehicle for understanding truth. Although a narrative hermeneutics
may be thought of as in pursuit of truth, it does not claim to deal in truths but in
interpretations. The impasse of disinterested, atemporal, universal truth is consequent to
Gadamer (1960/1988) holds a similar position when he writes, “understanding is not based on
transposing oneself into another person, on one person’s immediate participation with another. To
understand what a person says is, as we saw, to come to an understanding about the subject matter,
not to get inside another person and relive his experiences” (p. 383).
42
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the meaningful distance introduced by narrative, between life as lived and life as
recounted, but this distance can never finally be overcome and as such truth must
continually be pursued. Every way of making sense is forged in the practices of
existence. Making sense of psychotherapy by the stretch of time does not only piece
together moments of being into meaningful narrative, but also seeks to live within the
time of an already meaningful existence. Thus, stories are both imposed upon, and
emergent from, the discordance of our reflective being.
A hermeneutics works critically with knowledge and interpretations of that
knowledge, yet a hermeneutic analysis is itself a form of knowledge that may be the
subject of interpretation in the effort to understand better. Unearthing assumptions does
not replace the knowledge it excavates nor make claim to a timeless objective truth of
what it represents43. A hermeneutic analysis cannot escape its own hermeneutics.
Interpretations are narratives that help us to understand better but they are not
demonstrable truths with proofs and theorems. The exchange of knowledge and
interpretation entails a way of being and becoming in the world that is carried along by a
desire. Explanations contribute to the circulation of meaning and help bring to light the
importance of psychotherapy; an importance that seems so objectively real by virtue of
the beliefs, presuppositions and ways of being in the world engaged in while coming to
these explanations. In short, the way of existing implied by explanations speaks to the
43
Russell (1988) is concerned that for hermeneutics to receive a critical and not dismissive
reception by rationalists and empiricists in psychology, it must have an objective form and
demonstrable explanatory power. However, in this case Russell does not appreciate that
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phenomena that that way of existing brings to light. The circle only loses its impotent
circularity when it can speak to another. To make sense is to fracture being and leave
something out of the reflection; to know is to hold something still and make assumptions.
Hermeneutics forwards the generation of meaning by inquiring into these assumptions.
Hermeneutically we understand truth not by evaluating expertise or skilful
technique, but by asking when the technique enables something to be recognized and by
inquiring into how something becomes meaningful. Likewise when we evaluate
psychotherapy we do not only look to technique and skilful formulation, but also to the
way in which the therapist explains and understands; that is, the way she is responsible.
Objective evaluations and quantitative analysis misrepresent psychological experience
insofar as they miss the interpolation of the descriptive and the meaningful in the
constitution of the psychological. Purely quantitative explanations are unsatisfactory
without a concomitant understanding of how numbers are meaningful. Yet a meaningful
account of psychotherapy is also felt to be lacking without providing narratives of
objectivity and empirical details of phenomena 44.
Thus, research is a never-ending dialogue that sustains the circle of interpretation
and understanding without arriving at a final truth. Insight only gives back more fully the
hermeneutics would not be taken on its own terms, and the potentially fertile dialectics of
differing interpretations would risk being lost to the submission to formulaic procedure.
44
Porter (1995) writes of an intricate historical tension between quantitative objectivity and expert
judgment. He explains how the push for rigor, due to suspicion of unarticulated expert knowledge
and distrust of intellectual elites, led to a trust in numbers based in a set of inflexible procedures.
Narratives of quantity, however, have not always been divorced from expert opinion. Porter writes
of the rise of quantification in 19th century medicine, “While physicians did not unanimously
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phenomena that one is engaged with in existence. Striving to ascertain atemporal
universal truth has its own eschatology that reinstates the purpose and motivation of its
search. Desire for something other than what is and the prospect of relief sets the
hermeneutic circle in motion, but any solution is impermanent and cannot be permanent
without losing its meaning for being. One must be willing to arrive fully in this narrative
movement because there is no end of meaning.
The Responsibility of Attestation
The truth of outcomes and processes of psychotherapy is complicated by the
historical cultural influences that give rise to the evaluation of outcomes and processes.
What is true at one time may not be true at another, but still the therapist is responsible.
The problem of responsibility and providing the best possible care depends on a knowing
of what this consists. This knowing is an account dependent on how one is existing
within a meaningful world. For example, the happiness of not noticing one’s being may
be a good psychological outcome. On the other hand, the wisdom of noticing one’s being
and critical reflection may be more valuable than the bliss of being absorbed in existence.
Other valuable outcomes may involve the struggle of conflicting interpretations or the
heroic empowerment of knowing one is right. There are different possible understandings
of what constitutes a good outcome as well as what are considered valuable processes of
oppose quantification, they doubted that medical numbers could have meaning apart from clinical
judgment” (p. 203).
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psychotherapy. The good and the valuable are not numerical abstractions but integrally
tied to ways of participating in the world45.
Psychological research into the outcomes and processes of psychotherapy are
narratives of existence and the extent to which they are only treated as numerical or
structural entities is the extent to which they lose their ontological significance. A
historical cultural existence constitutes the force of narration, making all significance
connected to an existential subjectivity. Yet meaning is constituted through recognition
of existence in terms of something other than what is. Consciousness of oneself as the
same or different finds continuity in promises that are made, the moral relationships one
has with others, what one hopes to be, and what one hopes is not.
Attestation seems like an appropriate level of certainty for the kinds of narrative
accounts typical of psychotherapy research. We can attest to the outcomes and important
processes of therapy, but we cannot make claim to their indubitable certainty by
referencing rigorous adherence to a set of procedures. Ricoeur identifies attestation as a
level of certainty in between the foundational and the capricious. Attestation is a
hermeneutic kind of certainty. It is the certainty of the promise; not trustworthy beyond
all suspicion, never obscuring how trust and personal responsibility are involved in issues
of validity. The reliability of psychotherapy does not involve identical sameness or idem;
outcomes and processes are not identical across time, place and persons. The sameness
45
The use of quantification in determining truth obscures the hermeneutics of trust inherent to the
following of any method. As Porter (1995) points out, “Perhaps most crucially, reliance on
numbers and quantitative manipulation minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal
trust” (p. ix).
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or difference of therapeutic experiences is configured in narrative as self-same or ipse,
which does not mean that the outcomes or processes are quantifiably identical, but that
something is experienced as the same or different. The hermeneutic responsibility of a
therapist is the responsibility of attestation. If all understanding is an ontological
dialectic, then we cannot have impersonal truth without suspending the generation of
meaning46. The researcher, like the therapist, is not merely curious about the object of
inquiry, but concerned. She takes a stand, understands her practices with historically and
culturally invested significance. Already animated by the vitality of a meaningful
existence, her practice signifies a desire and a promise to bring what matters to light.
Psychotherapy research as a practice of understanding promises to forfeit and
regain meaning in the effort to understand. Attachment to an interpretation that solidifies
as knowledge may refuse to enter the cycle of understanding by its claim to authority.
The interpretation is then at risk of becoming idolized knowledge that cannot participate
in the play of understanding. The more a community endorses an interpretation, the more
consensus there is, the more indubitable it becomes, and the greater risk for that
46
Testament to this suspension of meaning are the decades of process research that have done
little to advance our understanding of what makes psychotherapy meaningful. Interpretative
methods for analyzing significant therapy events (Bloch, & Crouch, 1985; Elliot, Shapiro, FirthCozens, Hardy, Llewelyn, & Margison, 2001; Lieberman, Yalom, & Miles, 1973) have resulted in
the identification of core themes such as altruism, guidance, and self-understanding; however,
identifying important therapeutic categories is limited in the extent to which it extends our
understanding of therapy and, in the end, the method effectively shuts down the generation of
meaning. Instead of opening dialogue and supporting the on-going conflict of interpretation in the
perpetual unfolding of meaning relevant to existence, process research closes in on the criteria for
important therapeutic categories. Although process research finds similarities to a hermeneutic
argument for psychotherapy in that both are concerned with meaning, process research subscribes
to a foundational and prescriptive epistemology whereas hermeneutics gives the foundational and
prescriptive a place in the dialectics of the circulation of meaning.
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interpretation to occlude alternate reflections. When interpretations do not communicate
but only tell, they seem to develop an impenetrable surface gloss that cannot play on
more than one registry. Yet cannons of knowledge are necessary contributions to the
cycle of understanding. It is only their refusal to enter into dialogue with the other and
their illusion of permanence that risks the dissolution of understanding47.
Without becoming an injunction outside of a dialogical practice of understanding,
hermeneutics promotes a view of responsibility that involves the accounts of
understanding another. A hermeneutic approach to responsibility includes reflection on
one’s claims to knowledge without then becoming caught solely in defending or securing
consensus of that reflective stance. Reflecting and knowing each make a claim that is
dependent on the existence of the other. Knowledge assumes phenomena are the
consequence of forces that will predictably determine outcomes. Reflection situates
knowledge within a world of meaning and works to interpret the limits of knowledge, but
reflection also has a history and involves a way of being that can be interpreted.
Hermeneutic research reflects on the assumptions of psychotherapy for the sake
of understanding better, and understands for the sake of explaining better. The hermeneut
does not dominate, but participates in living. Appreciating possibilities beyond the limits
of another’s recognition is part of the hermeneut’s being in the world, while it also refers
to something other than that being. The ability to acknowledge an otherness without
Porter (1995) writes, “In practice, objectivity and factuality rarely mean self-evident truth.
Instead, they imply openness to possible refutation by other experts” (p. 214).
47
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having to possess or dominate it, while not resorting to obsequiousness, allows
interpretations to circulate as testaments to desire.
A Question of Trust
One important function of clinical research is to appease the public demand for
trust in psychotherapeutic practices. The expert psychotherapist is not engaged in a
personal relationship, but rather in a professional relationship for the purpose of
providing mental health service. The recognition of expertise as undemocratic elitism has
made way for the demise of the expert and the rise of operational objectivity and
consensus as standards of responsibility48. The patient is now the consumer seeking
guaranteed effectiveness of standardized procedures. Instead of asking how therapies
work and how they are meaningful, research is focused on providing assurances of
effectiveness. What therapeutic procedures have effective outcomes? Which techniques
are effective for which problems? But if the outcome of psychotherapy returns the
therapist and patient to a meaningful presence, then the outcome of psychotherapy is not
an objective truth guaranteed by following procedure, but an intersubjective narrative of
human existence that manifests through dialogue and reflection. Insofar as all outcomes
are dialogical, narrative responsibility and not permanent objective validity is central to
the ethics of therapy.
48
Psychotherapy is both a discipline and a service, which makes it highly susceptible to public
criticism. Porter (1995) explains how “rigorous quantification is demanded in these contexts
because subjective discretion has become suspect. Mechanical objectivity serves as an alternative
to personal trust [and as such] quantification works as a technology of trust in the scientific
disciplines” (p. 90).
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Instead of seeking consensus on a single position, hermeneutic research takes on
the commitment to exchange knowledge for the purpose of developing greater
understanding. By oscillating between the nearness of understanding and the distance of
knowing, the public can trust that research will strive for truth by upholding a fruitful
dialectic of the being and becoming of understanding. Narrative outcomes are
idiosyncratically indeterminate and interpretively unpredictable. Their meaning depends
on investments that have been made in ways of being. While all narratives strive to
escape limitations, historical determinates are tacitly included in all claims to knowledge.
At once placing oneself within the context in which one belongs and transcending that
belonging by objectifying one’s belonging, research can accommodate an evaluative
moment within a process and not a state of understanding. Hermeneutic research
becomes trustworthy because it is dialogical. It takes responsibility for holding a space of
tension between knowing and not knowing and resists the temptation to adopt and defend
one or another position because devolving into a position of advocacy gives up the
generation of meaning to the formation of ideology. Taking seriously both the realism of
things that are understood and the ways of being entailed by any form of understanding,
narrative investigations that circulate knowledge in dialogue can ensure the responsibility
of treatment approaches without silencing possibilities of meaning. Being responsible for
communicating about different approaches to therapy, instead of procuring the
correctness of an approach entrusts hermeneutic research to further our understanding of
psychotherapy. In this way, the truth of an outcome is a value incarnate in the therapeutic
relationship. Instead of entering evidence in the impossible game of proof, evidence
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enters as an announcement and is subject to the hermeneutics of narration and
interpretation in the effort to understand.
Hermeneutic research can provide a way of making sense of widely divergent
approaches to therapy and psychotherapy research. A hermeneutics that seeks to explain
psychotherapy, to understand it better, and to understand it to explain it better, does not
seek to eliminate alternative approaches, but instead works to understand one
interpretation of therapy in terms of another. Hermeneutics has the potential to reduce the
isolation of different psychotherapies without violating the integrity of difference. Taking
seriously biological, psychological, social, mythological, historical, and political
orientations to the understanding of psychotherapy could facilitate relations across
different areas of psychology49.
A hermeneutics of psychotherapy takes seriously the importance of interpretations
in terms of how they conform to a larger world of pre-reflexive meaning. For example,
psychosurgery has lost its value as a credible therapy not because it does not have an
effect on disordered behaviour and difficult emotions, but because it stops making sense
as a therapeutic action and has no meaningful continuity with the concept of care.
Psychosurgery is no longer linked to a vision of the desired insofar as brain damage does
not correspond to a vision of the good life. The meaning of lobotomy is no longer held to
be a worthwhile understanding of mental health care. A hermeneutic perspective allows
49
Fowers &Richardson (1996) write about the hermeneutic possibilities for enhancing a sense of
common purpose and community among therapists. Efforts at understanding practices in lieu of
securing knowledge of phenomena might contribute to an awareness of common concerns and
insights in psychology.
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for different practices and experiences of psychotherapy to be understood, not as right or
wrong, good or bad, but inherent to a way of relating and being in a world.
Understanding psychotherapy is a matter of recognizing practices as belonging to
traditions, and inquiring into how these practices and traditions are a meaningful part of a
community that has a vision of a world worth living in 50. The hermeneut works to
understand the meaning of our practices and questions psychotherapy as an undertaking
commiserate with a particular way of life. When is a psychotherapy practice meaningful?
When is it insignificant? When is it absurd? Hermeneutic research as a historical cultural
inquiry can generate not only cautionary narratives, but also further our understanding of
the forces behind certain practices and the desires they entail.
Having given up hope at solving the meaning of existence, a narrative
hermeneutics works with dynamic transitions of meaning between communities of
knowledge, and regains hope in dialogue where it is lost in the dispossession of the
absolute. Understanding the meaning of social practices holds out a hope perpetually
renewed, not by the satisfaction of desire, but through understanding and renewal of
meaning. There is no need to lament the loss of permanence in the pursuit of
understanding. As awareness is turned toward the tradition that precedes understanding
For example Valenstein (1986) writes of the history of psychosurgery, “the story of lobotomy
involves many factors: opposing theories of mental dysfunction; a long political struggle within
medicine between psychiatrists and neurologists; a desperate human need and a procedure that
offered to cure it; immediate enthusiasm in the popular press; uncritical acceptance by the medical
profession, which not infrequently paid little attention to the validity of the claims of success; and
determined and ambitious doctors” (p. 6)
50
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and the tacit consensus structured in our interpretations of existence, conditions for
awareness of meaning are continually renewed as new understanding is engendered.
Hermeneutic Risks
When taking a hermeneutic approach to psychotherapy and its research one
should be aware of a number of significant limitations. Although the emancipatory
capacity of understanding depends on the availability of unique communicative forums
where people can participate in unrestricted dialogue, both the psychoanalysts and the
hermeneuts teach that all narration is restricted insofar as it is meaningful. To be
conscious of one thing is to be unconscious of something else. So while therapy and
research can promote circumstances for dialogical inquiry, practices are always limited
in their ability to liberate communication. Hermeneutic investigations can only begin
with what is, work to understand what meaning is generated from what is, and then return
to be within the meanings that are known.
Another potential limitation to a hermeneutic approach is the risk of minimizing
the differences between positions in the rush to understand one thing as another.
Hermeneutics hazards being impatient with knowledge, recognizing it only as part of a
process of understanding and refusing it unconscionable permanence. This may not
always be appropriate. In the generation of meaning Ricoeur tries hard not to lose hold of
the tension between moving and stable horizons of reference. He does not allow the
reproductive function of representation to completely occlude its productive function, nor
does the reproductive work of description preclude a productive effect. However, the
reproductive reference must be deferred for the productive to be noticed, just as the
200
reproductive must be deferred to gain awareness of the generative aspect of
representation. A hermeneutics does not claim to be the only player in the drama of
understanding. It concedes parts to epistemology, phenomenology, and ontology. Each is
victorious in its own time. A hermeneutics is defeated by another when it is inappropriate
to the problem at hand. It is when meaning is at issue that hermeneutics finds its
occasion.
Hermeneutics also risks logically undermining its own position. Hermeneutics is
the practice and philosophy of understanding, and as a philosophy, it presumes to be
knowledgeable. As such, hermeneutics is a critique epistemology while it also creates an
epistemology of hermeneutics. It may thereby seem to logically undermine its own
position. However, a dialogical narrative hermeneutics does not fit easily into the
category of epistemology. Indeed, it cannot be an epistemology insofar as all knowledge
is interpretation tied to life. A narrative hermeneutics is dynamic and always ready to
transform in its work to understand an alternate position. In this sense hermeneutics is a
practice bound to dialogical conditions of existence. Otherwise it becomes dogmatic in
its rejection of domination and assured in its knowledge of not knowing. Hermeneutic
investigations seek consensual understanding not by appealing to credentials beyond
criticism, nor by coercing opinion with evidence, nor by the oppression of majority rules,
but by dialogical practices of explanation, interpretation and communication that seek
recognition and the negotiation of understanding. Although hermeneutics cannot hope for
a kind of final understanding free from distortions affected by its own dynamics of desire
201
and fear, a hermeneutic inquiry provides the hope of alternatives and preserves a spring
of possibility by narrating the significance of our practices.
Hermeneutics teaches that understanding is the cure of therapy and the aim of
research as it works to recognize the other in the development of a narrative.
Explanations of the world signify the desire to make sense; they are meaningful in and of
themselves only because they are also vehicles for conveying further meaning. Meaning
is generated out of the transient communicated nature of symbolic representation as
significance continually fades to being. For this reason, hermeneutic research focuses on
what is happening when we understand and not on what it is that we understand. A
hermeneutics does not offer the freedom to achieve our desires, but the freedom of being.
It forfeits the attainment of our desires in exchange for the freedom to be desirous.
202
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