10.13125/CH/4653
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2533-1825
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urn:nbn:it:unica-26998
Ignacio Iglesias Colillas
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Critical Hermeneutics
Editors' Introduction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch
4
Articles
2021-05-24
2021-05-24
2021-05-24
2021-05-24
I-XV
1
Ignacio Iglesias Colillas
2020
10.13125/CH/4653
I
2533-1825
2
XV
urn:nbn:it:unica-26998
Editors' Introduction
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/download/4653/4735
4
Critical Hermeneutics, 4 (2020)
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy
http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/index
ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 13125/CH/4653




                              Editors’ Introduction


      (Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics: An Introduction)




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
Editors’ Introduction




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.
      It seems to us that this may allow us to understand the
relationship between the two disciplines in a new way, beyond certain
misunderstandings that weighed on the reception of hermeneutics in
the psychoanalytic field in the last decades of the last century. We refer
to hermeneutic relativism (the opposition between narrative truth and
historical truth, the very denial of the existence of a historical past, the
absolutisation of the creation of meaning) and coherentism, which sees
in hermeneutics the aspiration to a clear and systematic interpretation,
without deviations. In the first case, hermeneutics has been flattened
into narrativism, which ignores the importance of history and psychic
reality, but which is completely alien to many important authors from
Pareyson to Betti, from Ricoeur to Gadamer himself. In the second, on
the other hand, hermeneutics is considered within the specific
paradigm of “strong” narration, with which it has very little to do, given
the constant recognition and enhancement of inachèvement.
      Also in this sense, Paul Ricoeur’s reflection is theoretically
balanced and fruitful for clinical work, where he argues that the
narrative function can sometimes consist in “thickening, in increasing
opacity, that is, in referring to mystery but still through language”
(Ricoeur 1986a; our translation). It is clear that such a definition of


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narrative implies also, or perhaps above all, the language of the
fragment, of the poetic word, of the inachevé.
    With these clarifications, it is then possible to fully reaffirm the
centrality of language, but at the same time to stop seeing it in
opposite    terms    to   the   non-verbal    sphere     (relation,     empathy,
containment, etc.) on which psychoanalysis of the last fifty years has
focused so much. Hans Loewald, a psychoanalyst who has thought a
lot about language, quotes Paul Valery, when the poet says that
language force us to be rather than to understand, and then comments
that this is what happens during the most productive moments of the
psychoanalytic session (Loewald 1980).
    We think that in order to account for the hermeneutic status of
psychoanalysis, it is necessary today for psychoanalysts to reflect on
the contributions of continental philosophy; at the same time it is
important for philosophers to pay attention to the reconceptualisation
of the idea of the unconscious that has widely traversed psychoanalysis
over the last fifty years and has more recently met with that of
neuroscience, which has contributed to defining what is included under
the term of the unrepressed unconscious.
    As Ricoeur puts it in a fundamental passage of his last interview
on psychoanalysis il y a un intraduisible devant la traduction et il y a
un intraduisible produit et révélé par la traduction (Ricoeur 2003: 108).
This is in a way the essence of the psychoanalytic process: to interpret
not for the sole purpose of clarifying and thus concluding, but also to
augment     the     untranslatable,    to   enhance     the    unrepresentable
foundation of the unconscious.
    In psychoanalysis, the hermeneutic circle first of all declines
precisely   in    the     dialectic   between   representation          and     the
unrepresentable. Accessing one of these two dimensions is not valuable
in itself, but – above all – as a gateway to the other. Through
unconscious representation we encounter and can enhance the
                                                                                   III
Editors’ Introduction




dimension of unrepresentability of the human mind, especially in its
creative and symbolic values. At the same time, by connecting with the
unrepresentable, mainly on a sensory and emotional level, we can
encourage the emergence of new representations.
      This introduces us to a dialectical conception of psychoanalysis. In
the essay De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud (1965) Paul Ricoeur
identifies     such     a   dialectical   movement   in   the   circle   between
archaeology and teleology, thus distancing psychoanalysis from the
«philosophies of suspicion», but also freeing it from a rigid link with its
metapsychological roots. He thus inaugurated a path that only years
later would lead within the psychoanalytic movement to a diffusion of
the concepts of intersubjectivity, relation, interaction and, finally, of
translation, which is also the expression of Ricoeur’s last paradigm of
hermeneutics (Jervolino 2001).


Note to the contributions in this issue. Let us now take a brief overview
at the contributions collected in this issue. In Truth at the Corssroads
Between Internal and External Reality Giuseppe Martini presents an
exhaustive analysis of the problem of truth in the analytic experience
and, with reference to Pareyson, he states from the outset, as a
fundamental axiom, that truth only appears within interpretation, but
that at the same time interpretation can only be directed towards truth.
Now, is truth therapeutic? And if so, when and in what way?, the author
asks. The clinic teaches that there are powerful forces that oppose
head-on the discovery/construction of truth: the desire not to know,
supported by the death drive that usually feeds suffering. It should also
be added that psychoanalysis is concerned with an emotional truth, not
a cognitive one. Adopting a hermeneutic attitude, Martini stresses that
what is fundamental is the translational function of the analyst:
“l’analista traduce lingusticamente le emozioni del paziente e questi a
sua volta converte in ‘materia affettiva’ l’interpretazione dell’analista”.
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                                                        Critical Hermeneutics, 4 (2020)




The article demonstrates the impossibility of separating the concepts
of truth and internal – psychic – and external reality. Hence the
pertinent questions that insist: “A quale realtà si volge la verità? Che
cosa è la realtà e cosa la realtà interna?” The author adheres – and
rightly so – to the perspectives that affirm that the analytical process
implies   a   continuous       co-creative      construction.       But   here    the
philosophical perspectives on the problem of reality are not neglected,
quite the contrary. Relying on Ricoeur, the author dwells on the knot
between reality and history, a problematic that is also central to the
analytic cure, especially in relation to the concept of trauma in
transference we might say, where the present and the past overlap,
resignifying each other. Ricoeur’s concepts allow the author to dispel
any   reductionism,        while   at   the     same   time     maintaining       the
insurmountable       ambiguity      that      runs   through    philosophy        and
historiography in terms of the accurate establishment of the concept
of reality, which always rides between the illusion of matter and the
illusion of fiction. Moreover, Ricoeur presents practical tools that allow
us to understand in depth the multiple dialectical processes that sustain
this concept, something that the author uses to support and validate
the clinical and epistemological use of the paradigm of translation, in
which the power of symbolisation acquires a central role.
The question What reality is psychic reality? is still insisted on in the
essay Psychic Reality: A Critical Perspective Between Psychoanalysis,
Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, by Vinicio Busacchi and Ignacio
Colillas. Although we owe to Freud the establishment of the
Unconscious     as     a     psychic       reality   from     the     clinical    and
psychopathological points of view—the ego is not master in its own
house—philosophies, as discourses of a non-unitary character, “han
contribuido tanto a la aparición y definición de la idea de inconsciente
como a su complicación, su puesta en duda, e incluso a su negación”
– the authors state. The proposal – which critically interrogates
                                                                                     V
Editors’ Introduction




psychoanalysis – focuses mainly on two perspectives: those of Michel
Henry and Paul Ricoeur. Henry’s phenomenology allows the authors to
highlight the centrality of affectivity as an ontological manifestation,
since “es la afectividad la que se revela/no se revela tras la
representación”.        Henry’s   critical   perspective   on   psychoanalysis
“permite un interesante enfoque en clave fenomenológica sobre la
relación entre pulsión y representación”, they explain. Henry insists on
the fracture between Being and Representation, which is the critical
core of his phenomenological discourse. On the other hand, Ricoeur’s
hermeneutic phenomenology allows us to take up critically the
permanent conceptual tension between drive and representation, in
order to be able to specify the very constitution of psychic reality. The
essay reminds us that Freud did not apply the opposition between
conscious and unconscious to the drive, and that the drive itself never
comes into consciousness, but only its representation: “es decir, si no
apareciera unida a una representación o en forma de afecto, no se
sabría nada de ella”. And as far as the understanding of the concept of
representation is concerned, Ricoeur gave a detailed account of this
multiplicity of registers, and how it ‘cambia significativamente según el
registro y el paradigma adoptado, ya sea energético, mecánico,
estructuralista, lingüístico o hermenéutico’ – Busacchi and Colillas
specify.
The perspective adopted by Richard Theisen Simanke in the essay
Preliminary       Remarks    On    a   Historical-Philosophical   Method   for
Conceptual Research in Psychoanalysis: A Reflection from the Brazilian
Experience proposes a combined application of two perspectives in
order to consolidate a historical-philosophical method in conceptual
research in psychoanalysis: 1) the internal structural and conceptual
analysis of the works and 2) the historical analysis of the scientific and
intellectual context in which these works appear, this being one of its
most substantial contributions. This precise methodology contributes
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to the construction of a philosophy – or epistemology – of
psychoanalysis,    within   the   framework      of   the    reception       of
psychoanalysis in Brazilian philosophy. In the case of Freud’s work, for
example, a conceptual analysis undoubtedly implies a study of 19th
century medicine, psychology and biology. The author offers, as an
example, what Freud said about infantile sexuality. There has
undoubtedly been a neglect of history in the field of the philosophy of
psychoanalysis: “C’est le besoin d’un tel type d’historiographie critique
et philosophique comme programme de recherche théorique en
psychanalyse que l’on a essayé de suggérer ici”, the author concludes.
    From different perspectives and maintaining multiple differences,
these three articles converge in the interrogation of the concepts of
psychic reality, truth and history, themes that both hermeneutic
phenomenology and psychoanalysis as a method of treatment
(Behandlungsmethode) are concerned with.
    With the following work, Symbol and Interpretation in the Work of
Reparation, we move from the more strictly psychoanalytical to the
ethical field, but not without an important trait d’union. This link is
given by the symbol, which also allows a reference to healing practices
and, therefore, to psychoanalysis itself. If we had previously seen the
multiform correlations of the symbol, on the one hand, with the drive
and affectivity, on the other, with truth, psychic reality and translation,
now its restorative value is at stake. Paolo Bettineschi underlines how
symbolic reparation is made possible by the equation between the
symbol and the original good object to be reconstituted. Equalisation,
says the author “è quel rapporto che consente a due cose o due oggetti
differenti di rimanere differenti pur essendo assunti […] come cose o
come oggetti che possono stare in pari quanto al loro valore”. Thanks
to the symbol, repair widens its range of possibilities, as it is “in grado
di aumentare in maniera potenzialmente illimitata il numero degli
oggetti buoni che per noi valgono come nuovi o sostitutivi rispetto a
                                                                             VII
Editors’ Introduction




quelli originari”. This also makes it possible to make the work of
symbolic reparation more concrete. The author’s reflection thus
translates into a firm anchorage between the idea of symbol and the
idea of good, so that what the symbol allows is, in the final analysis,
“in grado di aumentare in maniera potenzialmente illimitata il numero
degli oggetti buoni che per noi valgono come nuovi o sostitutivi rispetto
a quelli originari”. This also makes the work of symbolic reparation
more concrete. The author’s reflection thus translates into a firm
anchoring between the idea of symbol and the idea of good, so that
what the symbol ultimately enables is “l’esperienza del rinnovarsi del
bene dopo l’accadimento del male”.
       The next two contributions shift the field again: from ethics to
aesthetics, and once again with a special focus on the symbolic. In the
first of the two, Only the Truth Can Save Us? Cinema and the Conflict
of Interpretations, the reflection focuses on two films that have given
rise to much debate from a psychoanalytical and interpretative point
of     view:   Shutter   Island   and   Inception.   They   appear   as   two
paradigmatic works of the spirit of post-modernity that, although in
different ways, propose a radical and perhaps even shattering
reflection on identity. Quite appropriately, Maria Teresa Pacilé
approaches them in the light of the Ricoeurian concept of narrative
identity and, in this way, her reflection connects with the themes of
truth and psychic reality addressed in the first two works. Where is
truth: in “reality” or in the dream? And is it possible to distinguish
between the two? And again: is truth really curative, even when it has
a traumatic value that risks rendering it indigestible? This second
question seems more difficult to resolve than the first. Indeed, we can
recognise that “ogni livello di realtà ha la propria autenticità” and it is
good to “vivere la complessità della realtà polidimensionale all’interno
della quale da sempre ci troviamo”, as Inception seems to invite us to
do. And yet, “che ne è della verità, in questo gioco di luci ed ombre?”.
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It seems that the discovery of a highly traumatic truth, to which the
protagonist of Shutter Island finally gains access, only generates a
new, even more dramatic rejection of reality and of the past, which
translates into a narrative identity that places him and us “di fronte ad
un abisso” in which we are afraid to reflect ourselves. The author
creatively hovers between a (therapeutic) path that leads the
protagonist of Shutter Island out of the maze, but that does not save
him, definitively consigning him to an inability to live, and a path that
allows the protagonist of Inception a symbolic elaboration that
reconnects him with the life (with a “capacità di vivere non ostante
tutto”).
From film to literature there is a short step. With the subsequent “The
Shimmer Is Inside Really”. D.H. Lawrence’s Resurrection Myth and
Wilfred’s Bion’s Transformations in “0” Emily Griffiths aims to read the
work of the famous English writer and his aesthetic theory centred on
the mystery of Christian resurrection through a key offered by the
theoretical contributions of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. Here, too,
there is a connection with one of the previous works (the fourth) insofar
as much of the reflection revolves around the Kleinian concept of
reparation. In fact, by using Kleinian and Bionian theories instead of
Freudian, the author is able to move away from a paranoid reading,
more in line with a hermeneutics of suspicion and Freudian
metapsychology, towards a reparative reading whose idea she borrows
from Sedgwick. This seems more in keeping with a possible function of
Lawrence’s novels as “reparative container”:


     Employng Bion’s notion of epistemophilic ‘0’ demonstrates
     consonance with Lawrence’s depictions of truth in the
     resurrection myth however, as ‘0’ can only be-ed and not
     known, Lawrence’s attempt to represent this transcendent
     positionality demonstrates that art is ‘more complete’ than
                                                                             IX
Editors’ Introduction




      the hermeneutic act of ‘reparative’ criticism.


      In light of this, Griffiths examines three seminal works by the
English writer, Son and Lovers, Lady Chatterey’s Lover and The Man
who Died, to conclude that “Lawrence’s dramatization of the transition
between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positionalities is made
possible by the reparative, containing function of the novel”.
      The overview concludes with a paper by Sanja Ivic: The
Significance of Paul Ricoeur’s Narrative Theory and Hermeneutics for
the Understanding of Carl Jung’s Red Book. Indeed, as the author
reminds us, the reference to hermeneutics is highlighted in Jung
himself several times (unlike Freud), although he too does not seem to
have been familiar with the major philosophers of this orientation.
However, it is again his peculiar attention to the symbol that naturally
leads him to privilege the interpretative aspect in the hermeneutic
sense over the semiotic dimension and to correlate dreams and
fantasies on the one hand, and myths and legends on the other. Ivic
thus argues that it is possible to establish an analogy between the
Ricoeurian innovation/sedimentation dialectic and the Jungian present
moment/historical psyche. Hence, the author proceeds to a reading of
The Red Book as a narrative experiment, taking into account the
Ricoeurian idea of the interpretation of a text as an interpretation of
the self that finds its result in narrative identity. Jung’s own emphasis
on narrative suggests that we follow this path and understand his
autobiographical text as ‘a narrative experiment, which expands the
idea of plot and narration to include visions, dreams and fantasies’.
This implicitly confirms Ricoeur’s idea of plot as a synthesis of the
heterogeneous and, at the same time, underlines the collective and not
only personal character of the Zurich psychoanalyst’s visionary
experience, in line not only with the idea of the collective unconscious,
which he will develop in his theoretical works, but also to some extent
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with Ricoeur’s conception of the literary tradition.


How is the hermeneutic horizon reflected in the psychoanalyst’s clinical
work? However, we would not like to conclude this introductory note
without moving from text to action. That is to say: how much and how
is a hermeneutic inspiration reflected in praxis, that is, in the clinical
work of the psychoanalyst?
      Here another term arises that the two disciplines have in common:
the person.
      It is up to the person to open the first horizon in which the
encounter between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics is played out:


      Je reviens toujours à ma question de la souffrance, la
      souffrance insupportable et la souffrance supportable […] La
      psychanalyse nous conduit à reconnaître, dans la souffrance
      initiale, des ressources de sens qui vont faire apparaître une
      autre profondeur, et peut-être même une signification qui lui
      était initialement étrangère. A la fin, on ne souffre ni de la
      même chose, ni de la même façon. On souffre d’autre chose
      et autrement, mais d’une façon compréhensible, qui a l’unité
      d’une certaine cohérence narrative et qui permet tout
      simplement de continuer de vivre, de vivre avec les autres et
      avec soi-même comme je viens de le dire (Ricoeur 2003: 106,
      108).


      Is this not what distinguishes the work of the psychoanalyst and
his or her particular link to the question of meaning?
      In line with the above, it is necessary to strongly insist that it is
not   legitimate   to   consider   hermeneutics    as   a    “tendency”       of
psychoanalysis, a kind of theoretical model that can be placed in
opposition to others, perhaps more interested in neuroscience or more
                                                                               XI
Editors’ Introduction




linked to the thought of classical authors (Freud, Klein, Bion, Winnicott,
Kouth, Lacan, etc.). Hermeneutics is rather a perspective that inspires
the psychoanalyst, informs her or his style (both in clinical and
theoretical reflection). Finally, if there is a specificity of hermeneutics,
it is that of encouraging dialogue between theories and their dialectical
confrontation.
      But above all – it has been said – it is the attention to the subject,
to the other and to intersubjectivity and the consequent vocation for
dialogue that both fields share. Hermeneutics strongly raises the
question of the subject, which does not mean posing a strong subject:
rather, it emphasises the conception of a subjectivity suspended
between the cogito and the anticogito (Jervolino 1993) and this is
precisely what it shares intimately with psychoanalysis. As an author
who dialogued with Ricoeur reminds us, psychoanalysis captures the
subject in its division, in its fragmentation, and, in turn, can give rise
to a deconstruction, but nevertheless its aim is precisely the
emergence of the subject (Castoriadis 1975-1990: 98).
      At this point, it is possible to attempt again a definition of
hermeneutics that can have a significant impact on therapeutic work.
We will start again from Paul Ricoeur, who summarises its double task
in the reconstruction of the dynamics of the text and in the projection
of the work to the outside in order to represent a habitable world
(1986).
      Hermeneutics would then imply three instances: a) the search for
meaning while respecting the text and the author’s intentions, b) the
attribution, once this meaning has been acquired, of a further
significance, with a view to opening up new horizons, c) the ability to
succeed in converting this text into the representation of a world that
our patients “can inhabit”.
      If one ignores only one of these three instances, which we could
respectively call veritative, constructive and ethical, one can only fall
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back on the others, totally disrupting their function, which is indeed
specific, but which occurs only in the interconnection with the other
two.
       Taking into account also the multiplicity of the levels of language
mentioned above (not reducible only to the semantic dimension), the
theoretical opposition between interpretation and relation and the
clinical opposition between interpreting and containing is then
abandoned. This is a fundamental and widely shared point, to which
many currents of psychoanalysis have arrived by their own and
diversified paths, but which can find significant support from the
hermeneutic perspective.
       It is interesting that the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden (2019) has
recently proposed to differentiate between two distinct models, in
constant interaction with each other, which he has called with happy
intuition   epistemological    and     ontological,   the    first   centred     on
knowledge, the second on being and becoming.
       The psychoanalyst inspired by hermeneutics is undoubtedly
situated in this second aspect in which the word, language and
translation open up to being and in particular to “co-existence” and aim
at becoming, at the transformation of unbearable suffering into
bearable     suffering.   On    this    path,    both       hermeneutics        and
psychoanalysis are configured as a kind of bridge that connects the
shore of the emotional (especially that part of the emotions that cannot
tolerate or cannot reach the word) with the shore of language, which
opens up the possibility of narrative, self-acceptance and the
construction of identity.


                                                               Giuseppe Martini
                                                      Ignacio Iglesias Colillas




                                                                                 XIII
Editors’ Introduction




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Ricoeur, P. 1965. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation.
Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2008.




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Editors’ Introduction




XVI
