La sfida dell'irrapresentabile. La prospettiva ermeneutica nella psicoanalisi clinica [The challenge of the ‘un-representable’. The hermeneutic perspective in psychoanalysis] By Giuseppe Martini Milano:  Angeli. 2005.

Giuseppe Martini, the author of this book, is a member of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and lives in Rome, where he has a private practice and works as a psychiatrist for the social services. He is also the author of previous works on the role of hermeneutics in psychoanalysis. This book tackles the complex debate on the hermeneutic nature of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, it attempts to place

the relationship between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics within the context of the great tradition created by the theorist Paul Ricoeur. On the other hand, it relaunches this relationship on new ground, in the realm of that which cannot be represented, a theme which would seem to have been designed to throw into question all the claims of hermeneutics.

Theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis have always had strong ties with the field of hermeneutics. The work of trying to transform the internal world of the patient through means of understanding and interpretation, which aims to uncover hidden meaning, to make sense of something and to make ‘thinkable’ that which has previously been ‘unthinkable’—this is ample justification for the case that psycho-analysis is a hermeneutic discipline.

The question of how to understand the relationship between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics has nevertheless generated a number of theoretical and clinical problems. If, on the one hand, hermeneutics has thrown into question the more naive forms of psychic determinism, on the other hand, it has produced theoretical developments, the most notable being the hermeneutic model which has emphasized the importance of narrative truth over and above historical truth. The impossibility of reconstructing a hypothetical historical truth (even one which is attainable), and moreover the impossibility of making truth a requirement for analytic interpretation, led to the identification of the essence of psychoanalysis—with its purely narrative function. Psychoanalysis aims t