Abstract
Interpretation (German: “Deutung”) is generally regarded as an exclusive instrument used by an elitist psychoanalysis. In this study we will broaden this perspective and reconstruct the cognitive process that is immanent to interpretations. This will be done against the backdrop of the discourse of abduction. We will first present several clarifications of the concept of abduction with reference to various forms of deduction and induction and introduce four basic forms of the knowledge-finding process in the production of “new” insights. We will then proceed to juxtapose Charles Sanders Peirce’s ideas on abduction with Thomas Samuel Kuhn’s theories on “Scientific Revolutions” and his concept of the paradigm. Explanations regarding the empirico-hermeneutic circle of scientific research will constitute the third part of the background against which the abductive paradigm shift will be explored microanalytically as exemplified in the interpretative patterns of Jean Michel Charcot and Sigmund Freud.
Finally, we will develop a concept of interpretation that can serve as a means for gaining knowledge in psychotherapy science by networking six possible definitions in a categorical systematic account. This concept of interpretation will assume its legitimate place in psychotherapy science understood as a group of different paradigm-based systems of interpretation.
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Notes
- 1.
The problem lies in the fact that in German, there are two different terms: “Deutung” and “interpretation,” while in English there is only “interpretation.” In German the word “interpretation” has a very wide field of meaning. For referring to the specifically “psychoanalytical” form of interpretation, German-speaking analysts always use the term “Deutung.”
- 2.
Why the author is referring to the “planet” will become clear in Sect. 6.3.1.
- 3.
For colleagues who are already taking issue with the seeming abstruseness of citing an “alien” in this text, this is less to make science more entertaining (which, I might add, is certainly underestimated) but more in response to the need to create a being for this fictive journey through various “scientific settings”—a being that can think of “newness” in terms of abduction and can be used to illustrate a lot of things that are “state of the art” for us, essentially new and sometimes at least in part not contextual. It couldn’t be a child because this being had to be in full possession of the “mental structures” of an adult. What remained here was a scientist from a completely different star!
- 4.
For this, we will simply assume that on his home planet “economical” has also gained currency as a criterion of scientificity.
- 5.
Strictly speaking, this means: “All humans who ever lived + all human who are alive at this moment + all humans who will be alive until humanity becomes extinct once and for all (otherwise until the end of all time).” And since this verification has to be carried out by a human being (if it is to be valid for human science, that is, excluding our fictive alien), it could not even determine the last live exemplar of humanity, since it would then still be living as a human being. At the moment this last human being also dies, it cannot make any more statements. Thus this universal statement is in principle and non-verifiable a priori (except by a nonhuman being with the capacity to make rational statements and to verify them both empirically and logically!) We have been waiting for a long time to find such living beings like our alien. But until we actually do find one such example simply remains thought experiments.
- 6.
“An abduction of a new cognitive instrument” would thus be a pleonasm on the basis of the definition presented here.
- 7.
That all three positions can and must also be viewed from the perspective of logical argumentation is state of the art for qualitative researchers and/or social scientists. Qualitative research uses “common-sense constructions” as its point of departure (Przyborski and Wohlrab-Sahr 2008, 26ff).
- 8.
If, for example, Allen himself (as a “human” based on the observation of Socrates’ death and his previous identity) were to infer the “mortality of man,” then this would first be a private individual abduction in the realm of categories or types. Since he only “learns” from the philosophers on earth, he is only adopting a scientific model of deduction (“humans” are mortal, when the next being can be identified as human, it automatically follows (without it being necessary to verify this empirically) that it is mortal.) If, however, Allen as a scientific emissary of his planet comes up with the idea that the surprising fact that no all old men have white beards can be explained by the fact that the white beard is a sign of social status, as “old sage” and not all old men have to or want to bear such a sign, he created a scientific individual abduction in the realm of explanatory models.
- 9.
In the next stage of Allen’s journey, we will also cite an example for abductions in the section on “cognitive goals.”
- 10.
Deduction, in its most stringent form, does not expand or even reform our knowledge—it only shows all what is implicit in it.
- 11.
The expression “transdisciplinary” also refers to something over-arching on Allen’s planet which is valid for all disciplines of a group of sciences (social sciences, natural sciences, etc.).
- 12.
In “interpretation 1” (German: Deutung) we create the referential categories for our observations; in “interpretation 2” (German: Interpretation), we incorporate what we have observed in the referential categories. This distinction will prove significant in the following!
- 13.
This “paradigm value” is higher, the closer the basic elements of the statement come to the core of the definition of the essential aspects of a central object in a given discipline.
- 14.
This connection of empiricism and hermeneutics is not just based on the “mainstream,” where these two often irreconcilable opposites are often addressed. For an inference and argumentation of this “new” conceptuality, see Stephenson (2003).
- 15.
“Text“ here is used in the broadest sense. The Latin word “textum” is the “tissue” that also “covers” what it “marks” (and “protects”) as the “tissue”—“tego” meaning “to cover.” In this sense everything that humans use in communication (words, gestures, sounds, images, etc.) is “text,” i.e., both “indicating and covering.” The sense and meaning of a “textum” must also be first grasped. This is something that all scientists processing their “raw data” with natural scientific, nomothetical, empirical means—this data must first be interpreted before insights can be inferred from them!
- 16.
From the original text of the lecture where Charcot actually did this before an audience of men and women: “You remember that (…) on March 15, the continuing pressure on the hysterogenous zone next to the pen… led to a completely classical hysteroepileptic attack happened” (Charcot 1886, p. 269).
- 17.
For Kuhn this would be an exemplar used to preserve the old paradigm.
- 18.
I know that this is a bold claim. And it is clear to me that meanwhile even the psychotherapeutic system of behavioral therapy works with a variation of the concept, simply because it is impossible otherwise to explain certain phenomena. This in itself is an interesting phenomenon.
- 19.
And it gives the entire discipline its name: psychotherapy science as the science that studies the “treatment” of the psyche!
- 20.
Here we once again have the perspective of a “double hermeneutics,” as, for instance, is highlighted by Smith (2004). He refers to “double hermeneutics: The participant is trying to make sense of their personal and social world; the researcher is trying to make sense of the participant trying to make sense of their personal and social world” (p. 40).
- 21.
Practical insights to the effect that clients undergoing Freudian analysis increasingly dream more “Freudian” (or dream more “Adlerian” or more “Jungian” when undergoing Adlerian or Jungian analysis) are proof of even more far-reaching “co-optations.”
- 22.
Just by virtue of the very use of this name such a categorization is taking place!
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Stephenson, T. (2015). Interpretation as a Cognitive Instrument: Psychotherapy Science as an Attempt to Pool Paradigm-Based Systems of Interpretation. In: Gelo, O., Pritz, A., Rieken, B. (eds) Psychotherapy Research. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1382-0_6
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