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While English-speaking philosophers have, for the most part, tested psychoanalysis against the standards of experimental science,
on the continent philosophy has often embraced psychoanalysis but in theoretical terms and meanings scarcely recognizable, at least to the American practitioner. Many writers in the continental tradition have recently had their works classed as “hermeneutics;” this text seeks to clarify that term by tracing its use by German philosophers from the 18th, but principally in the last two centuries, in a variety of fields of study, including philosophy, history, philology, theology, and the social sciences. In its first phase, hermeneutics is philological, concerned with the interpretation of texts. In the second and contemporary phase its scope and meaning are widened to include the whole of philosophy. This expansion is due to seminal thinkers such as Dilthey and Husserl, and is, like the variety of phenomenologies to which they gave rise, the result of a shift in focus away from the abstractions of ideas and theories and toward the concreteness of what men say and do. That all psychic processes can be regarded as symbolic presentations is perhaps an idea that Freud owed to his teacher Brentano, who is not represented in this text except through another of his illustrious students, Husserl. But the hermeneutic tradition may be characterized in terms of opting for the opposite of Freud's choice of interpreting psychic symbols as reflections of biological drives. Instead, they view the hermeneutic process as constitutive, rather than merely reflective of individual history and character. It is this notion of personal meaning that has led psychoanalysts inspired by this tradition to give up the quest for reconstruction of the analysand's past, on the general grounds that what was meaningul to one and no longer is so is no longer of concern. From this brief indication of what the hermeneutic thinkers are up to, it is perhaps clear that underst