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Donna Orange has written a book about hermeneutics, one in her series of books on philosophy written for clinicians. I reviewed her previous book, Thinking for Clinicians, in JAPA (White ). Her purpose in this book, she states, is “to present a group of my favorite subversives in the history of psychoanalysis and to bring them into conversation with Gadamerian hermeneutics and Lévinasian ethics” (p. ix).
In chapter 1, “What Is Hermeneutics,” she sketches the modern history of hermeneutics, the study of interpretation. Since the beginning of philosophy, we have had the question of interpretation. Traditionally, the formal study of hermeneutics in Western culture has focused on textual analysis, especially of the Bible.
It is only in the romantic tradition of the late eighteenth century that the idea of hermeneutics was expanded as a philosophical subject. thought hermeneutics could be universally applied to both written and oral communication, modern and ancient texts, and all languages, not just texts. He considered language to be the foundation of thought. Moreover, he believed, because language is fundamentally social in nature, verbal communication and dialogue are privileged over other forms of communication. Interpretation proper always has two sides: one linguistic, the other psychological. The linguistic is concerned with the usage of words, what is common in a language, while the psychological is concerned with individuality, what is distinctive about a particular subject. To fully understand a linguistic act, one must know not only its linguistic meaning but also what philosophers today call its “illocutionary” force or intention. Schleiermacher distinguished two types of interpretation, a “comparative” method, predominantly on the linguistic side of interpretation, and a “divinatory” method, predominantly on the psychological side. Schleiermacher was also the first to speak of the hermeneutic circle, a dialectic between parts and wholes. He understood that