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The hermeneutic tradition and narratology—two fields of knowledge repeatedly visited by both psychoanalysts and psychopathologists—are assigned a central position in this volume, which, according to the author himself, constitutes ‘an attempt to supply new theoretical foundations for psychiatric activity’ by informing it with psychoanalysis (p. 3). By keeping the dialogue between the two disciplines open, the author seeks to integrate them on the level of both theory and clinical practice.
The book is divided into two parts, ‘Method’ and ‘Practice’. The first begins with an excursus on narratology and hermeneutic philosophy, with the aim of facilitating a conceptualisation of psychiatry and psychoanalysis as a narrative exchange and as the search for and construction of meaning.
The author identifies three possible channels of access for psychoanalysis to hermeneutics: (1) the non-representational dimension of the unconscious as manifested in psychotic situations; (2) clinical approaches directed towards the here and now of the transference, where the analytic enterprise centres on the construction of a shared reality; and (3) the interpersonal and intersubjective aspect of the analytic dialogue.
In discussing the positions of the many authors who have grappled with the hermeneutic perspective (such as Schafer, Spence, Hoffman and Hanly in North America, and Chianese, Corrao, Laplanche, R. Steiner and Strenger in Europe), Martini is expressly concerned to ensure that it does not degenerate into relativism and an opposition between history and narration, which is in turn a restatement of the older opposition