Centers of Moral Gravity: Commentary on Donald Spence's “The Hermeneutic Turn”

The approach to psychoanalysis that Donald Spence takes in his paper is roughly the same as the one he took in his Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psycho-analysis (Spence, 1982). That approach seems to me just right. I think that psychoanalysis has suffered long enough from the aftereffects of Freud's awkward attempts to force it into the mold of “positive science.” I agree with Spence that Freud's attempt to model psychoanalysis on archaeology founders on the fact that, as Freud (1937) said about the Wolf Man case, “an assured conviction of the truth of the constructions … achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory” (p. 226). Since my own pragmatist philosophical views lead me to treat the distinction between finding and making as a difference that often makes no difference, I do not see much point in questions about whether the analyst discovers or invents the patient's unconscious. This question, like the dispute among philosophers of science about whether neutrinos are “objectively real” or just immensely convenient heuristic fictions, strikes me as an uninteresting verbal dispute. But, although my pragmatism leads me to agree with the strategy of Spence's paper, it also leads me to suggest, as Jerome Bruner does, that Spence push his conclusions a bit further.

I think that what Spence says in his paper is reinforced by a recent view of the self and of the nature of psychological inquiry—a view is, so to speak, tailor-made for us pragmatists. This is the view offered in a