Psychoanalysis and the Hermeneutic Turn: A Critique of Narrative Truth and Historical Truth

Abstract

Through a discussion of Donald Spenceapos;s Narrative Truth and Historical Truth, a critical introduction to the hermeneutic or interpretive perspective is presented. Spenceapos;s book has generally been assumed to offer a hermeneutic reformulation of psychoanalysis. However, its presuppositions are incompatible with fundamental tenets of contemporary hermeneutic thought, as expressed in the philosophies of Heidegger, Gadamer, and the later Wittgenstein.

Spenceapos;s basic assumptions are classically empiricist and positivistic. His vision of human experience is essentially associationistic and Humean; it treats experience as involving two processes, the passive reception of raw sense data and a subsequent projection of meaningful interpretation. Spence advocates the gathering of brute data while denying or downplaying the epistemological value of theorizing and of interpretive understandings. These assumptions are contrasted with those of the hemeneutic philosophers. Unlike these philosophers, Spence lends to dichotomize coherence and correspondence theories of truth. As a result, he wavers between relativism (regarding therapeutic interpretations) and objectivism (regarding scientific knowledge).

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