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Successful work with patients in psychoanalysis derives, we were taught, from a deepening sense of understanding, an uncovering of how biographical factors contribute to the patient's sense of self. We, like our patients, feel persuaded that our enterprise is not merely a convincing narrative but is grounded in a true historical matrix. Yet psychoanalytic research consistently fails to yield empirical data that verify the theories on which all schools of psychoanalysis are based. If psychoanalysis is scientific, as it traditionally has claimed, it needs to conform to the requirements of science. If it is not scientific, then what is it?
It is to this difficult question that Carlo Strenger responds in this cogent, straightforward, and altogether illuminating volume. Strenger contends that psychoanalysis properly belongs outside the realm of natural science and, hence, should not be judged by the same criteria. Instead, he argues, psychoanalysis is involved with interpreting the structure of meaning, with making explicit the perspective of the person as he experiences himself from within. In other words, psychoanalysis is hermeneutical. The hermeneuticist's interpretation of theories of development is that these comprise a collection of persuasive story lines that assist analyst and patient to find meaning in the patient's symptom or character formation and to provide the basis for richly interpreting the patient's productions in analytic sessions. For Strenger, the quality of certainty achievable by psychoanalysis “is more akin to that of historical research and legal proceeding than to the precision of the natural sciences” (p. 152).
Yet Strenger disputes the conventional hermeneuticist's view of psychoanalysis. In doing so, his essay offers its essential contribution. Psychoanalysis is a research program and a weltanschauung that consists of a pluralistic vision in which many points of view incorporate irreducible and independent standards of rightness. Strenger requ