Between Arrogance and a Dead-End: Psychoanalysis and the Heidegger-Foucault Dilemma*

The interpretive turn in the human sciences has profoundly influenced interpersonal, postmodern, and now relational psychoanalysis. Although it has transformed psychotherapy theory in many ways, some important philosophical difficulties have also followed in its wake. In this paper I examine two founders of the interpretive turn, the hermeneuticist Martin Heidegger and the postmodernist Michel Foucault. Practitioners of both theories feature an understanding of human being that is historical or cultural, and yet, admirably, attempt to avoid historical determinism. Some hermeneuticists do so by emphasizing how historical traditions intersect and then affect one another; some postmodernists do so by emphasizing the experiential and heuristic importance of the sociopolitical periphery. I examine these two strategies and their implications for psychotherapy by critiquing Heidegger's involvement in National Socialism and Foucault's limited vision of the moral: Heidegger's monocultural arrogance and Foucault's extreme relativism. I argue that both positions are deficient, and suggest that Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic concept of dialogue (enhanced with some of Antonio Gramsci's socialism) can remedy both flaws and point the way toward more helpful psychotherapeutic applications of the interpretive turn.