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Some psychoanalysts, skeptical or puzzled by the hermeneutic turn in psychoanalytic theory, may at times be reminded of Goethe's frequently quoted aphorism: “Grey, dear friend, is all theory, and green, life's golden tree” (Faust). Indeed, psychoanalysts with a more pragmatic bent may find themselves looking for the clinical kernel within the hermeneutic debate, life's golden tree as it were, or at least trying to find the forest through the trees.
Questions and implications, however, raised by this two-part symposium examining what and how the analyst knows point to the ways in which many clinical and epistemological questions are inextricably linked: what is the heart of the matter and what is the truth of the matter need to be considered simultaneously.
These questions attempt to move the analyst clinically from the high ground of being an expert decipherer to some common ground of being a participant-observer. Despite the enormous variability even within those analysts who maintain a relativist view of truth within the analytic situation, there is generally more and more agreement that the truth of the matter is contextually, not objectively, defined. This view of truth is emphasized well in the following joke about truth and cultural relativism. A fundamentalist Christian pastor was teaching some children a Sunday school lesson and posed a riddle: “What is it that collects nuts for winter, climbs trees, and has a bushy tail?” An eager child was called on by the pastor and said, “Well, I know the answer's Jesus Christ, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me.”
The hermeneutic turn in psychoanalysis does not arise de nova but rather is the extension of a number of ongoing problems and debates in