Psychoanalysis and hermeneutics

An overview of the relationship between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics. We would like to open this introduction by confessing an initial ambition that we now see with a more critical eye. The idea that initially prompted the construction of this issue of Critical Hermeneutics was to rethink in a systematic way the relationship between these two disciplines that have constantly but ambivalently attracted each other, perhaps since the birth of the younger one: psychoanalysis. However, we realised that the goal of a systematic review of the relationship between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis is not yet feasible. There are too many directions that can be given to reflection. The works that have arrived – and which we will briefly present in the next paragraph – testify precisely to this polyphony of voices, sometimes dissonant, but fertile and innovative. Indeed, by moving in so many different directions – from clinic to art, from historiography to phenomenology, from ethics to textual analysis – the resulting picture contributes to broadening perspectives, but also suggests the epoché of any possible claim to synthesis. However, it is still appropriate to ask what are the fundamental assumptions that legitimise and make necessary, today more than yesterday, the dialogue between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. This reminds us of what Hans Georg Gadamer (2003) said at a psychiatry conference about their relationship with hermeneutics: although both disciplines are dedicated to understanding, it is not so much this that distinguishes them, but the common interest in what escapes understanding itself. First of all, psychoanalysis can be included entirely in the field of hermeneutics, since language and the construction of meaning are strictly linked to the affective/emotional transformations they aim to activate. As Ricoeur (1988) states, analytic treatment is possible because affectivity is not foreign to language and consists in bringing into language what has been excluded from it. ...