You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Elyn R. Saks is Professor of Law, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Law School, and a Research Clinical Associate at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute. One characteristic of this author's first psychoanalytic book is the uneven quality of its chapters. Saks reviews succinctly the history of hermeneutics in philosophy and makes a fair and intelligent synthesis of the work of eight representative thinkers of hermeneutic psychoanalysis: George Klein, Roy Schafer, Herbert Fingarette, Robert Steele, Serge Viderman, Wolfgang Loch, Donald Spence, and Robert Sharpe. Saks quotes extensively from them, making the important point that “despite their similar vocabularies, the hermeneuts seemed to mean very different things” (p. vii). She eloquently explains how in this area, too, psychoanalysis has become a babel of tongues. In her discussion, the pars pro toto fallacy of many of these views is clearly exposed, as she shows how these authors often make general theories out of particular observations.
The author defines five views concerning the hermeneuts' positioning on the truth of analytic interpretations: the clinical psychoanalysis model, the story model, the alternative metaphysics model, the metaphor model, and the interpretations-as-literary-criticism model. The last chapters are dedicated to “the argument from patient rejection”; by this the author means the repudiation some modalities of hermeneutic psychoanalysis would face if only analysands knew their true implications. She critiques the claim that analytic interpretations are concerned only with meanings, not with facts, suspecting that “the hermeneutic view is a kind of backpedaling: the failure of psychoanalysis to live up to its scientific promise” (p. 208). Saks renders a good service to psychoanalytic theory in her conceptual delineation of these hermeneutic categories. She ascribes representative theoreticians to each model. George Klein, the early Schafer