Agency, Ontology, and Analysis: Roy Schafer's Hermeneutic Conflict

While several authors have contributed to the development of a hermeneutic conception of psychoanalysis (e.g., Gill, Goldberg, Spence, and Ricoeur), Roy Schafer has made one of the most sustained, and perhaps most radical attempts at reinterpreting psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic discipline. In his most recent book, Retelling a Life: Narration and Dialogue in Psychoanalysis (1992), Schafer calls for an extreme narrativization of psychoanalysis, and despite the radical commitments that this new approach demands, an explosion of recent references to this narrative theory suggests that there is something very appealing about it. Still, almost no work has been devoted to exploring its possibilities. I propose here that this dearth of critical work is the result of a certain incoherence in Schafer's book, an incoherence that arises from an ontological debate that lies at the foundation of hermeneutic psychoanalysis. Whether by intention or not, Schafer subscribes to two competing hermeneutic theories: a Diltheyan hermeneutics which approaches interpretation from an epistemological stance, and a Heideggerian hermeneutics which treats interpretation as an ontological event. The

result is a sometimes incomprehensible, but prophetic picture of the marriage between psychoanalysis and hermeneutic theory.