Reply to Katherine Morrison

I welcome this opportunity to respond to Katherine Morrison's scholarly, carefully reasoned essay on the way I use hermeneutics in my studies of psychoanalytic interpretation. Ms. Morrison claims to have identified what, as a philosopher, she calls first an “incoherence” in my use of hermeneutics and then a “tension” in my work between two opposed conceptions of hermeneutics; in the end she goes on to suggest constructively that this tension may be inevitable. She defines one conception, epistemological hermeneutics, as based on the idea that there is a truth to be uncovered—in psychoanalysis, “a hidden truth.” The other conception, ontological hermeneutics, is based on the idea that there is no one truth, that all we ever have are versions of whatever it is that is being studied, these versions representing perspectives on the object of study that express both the individual and the conventional. Ms. Morrison ascribes the first position to Dilthey and the second to Heidegger.

Although I have published discussions in which I claim that there are right or correct interpretations to be developed, thereby seeming to adopt the epistemological position, and although I have no doubt been guilty of lapses from absolute