You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The philosophical status of psychoanalytic knowledge is often discussed in terms of the purported hybrid nature of psychoanalysis, with much attention paid to different versions of the relation between its hermeneutic-interpretive and its scientific-objectivist aspects. This paper will examine key questions of epistemology and subjectivity as these have emerged in this debate about the suitability of hermeneutics as a framework for psychoanalytic theory and practice, especially as these questions have been put forward by relational-model theorists. Close critical readings of the hermeneutic positions of Roy Schafer, Paul Ricoeur, and Hans-Georg Gadamer provide the basis for articulating a balanced, fundamentally Gadamerian philosophical framework which can support and extend relational principles, and which offers a suitable discourse
Brett Clarke is a Clinical Social Worker in private practice in the Cincinnati, Ohio area.
within which psychoanalysis can describe a dialectically conceived, affectively imbued relational subject. Such a philosophical position regards a “separate but equal” status between hermeneutic interpretation and scientific method as unnecessary and inadequate to the demands of relational theory. Though the argument is for an overarching pluralist hermeneutic, it is definitively against a relativist or unconstrained pluralist position. Instead it suggests a hermeneutic which depends on the parameters of our practical knowledge to make sense, and which critically accommodates without privileging scientific knowledge. The paper concludes by exploring how such a hermeneutic and a relationally conceived psychoanalytic subjectivity might intersect dialectically, revising and enriching one another in the process.