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This is a marvelous book that has received too little publicity. It is the best single volume I have seen on this topic for a reading audience that might include psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists. It contains essays by an array of interesting and very important thinkers from the social sciences, philosophy, and psychopathology, many of whom are well known and have made original contributions to the field. Readers who have some background in the voluminous writings on hermeneutics and psychological theory will be impressed by the number of first-class authors that are brought together.
The central polemical issue referred to directly or indirectly in almost all the essays revolves around the problem of how to evaluate an interpretation. As Bernstein states, it is to Freud's great credit “that he was constantly aware of the need to face the thorny issues in evaluating competing and conflicting interpretations” (p. 89). Reluctantly most of the authors more or less agree with Bernstein's comment that it is not possible “to state once and for all, in a rigorous, determinate, and nonvacuous manner, what are or ought to be the standards, criteria, or rules by which interpretations can be epistemically evaluated” (p. 89). This indeed is the central complaint made against those who would envision the psychoanalytic process, or the dialogue in any dyadic interchange such as psychotherapy, as generating meanings that can be best understood by the procedures of hermeneutics rather than approached by the standard methods of natural science.
Hermeneutics is repeatedly defined as the art and science of interpretation. It emerged in the 17th century as an