Discussion1

IT IS PUZZLING THAT THE WORK of Jacques Lacan (1966), (1977) and the philosophical approach of hermeneutics have made so little impact on North American psychoanalysis. These two domains of theory are not of course, coterminus, but they have in common a consideration of the linguistic elements in the analytic situation, the discourse, the text. While language has been reasserted as a prime focus of attention in analytic theory (Levenson, 1972) ;

(Schafer, 1976), the central aspects of hermeneutics and many of the crucial features of Lacanian thought are not powerful forces in the current ferment within psychoanalysis in North America.

Lacan's work and the hermeneutical approach are more influential, however, outside psychoanalysis. There is a highly evolved discourse in literary criticism, in social theory, in critiques of culture in which semiotics, hermeneutics and Lacanian theory operate as contentious, sparking, provocative voices. A first question is thus why it has been so difficult to introduce or incorporate these approaches into analytic theory or clinical work. Obvious, though perhaps trivial reasons, lie in the quite forbidding technical language, and the idiosyncratic style. Lacan, it is now a commonplace to say, does not write in a way that is easily collaborative with his reader.

I think there's a more serious answer and here I do not fully agree with the way Stanley Leavy introduces the hermeneutic perspective. In his paper, "The Rules of the Game" and elsewhere (Leavy, 1980; 1982) the hermeneutic approach is offered as a new metaphor for analytic understanding, comparable though different from other approaches. It is akin in his view, to other language—