The Hermeneutic Versus the Scientific Conception of Psychoanalysis: An Unsuccessful Effort to Chart a Via Media for the Human Sciences

Abstract

According to the so-called “hermeneutic” reconstruction of classical psychoanalytic theory, the received scientific conception of the Freudian enterprise gave much too little explanatory weight to so-called “meaning” connections between unconscious motives, on the one hand, and overt symptoms on the other. Thus in a paper on schizophrenia, the German philosopher and professional psychiatrist Karl Jaspers [8, p. 91] wrote: “In Freud’s work we are dealing in fact with [a] psychology of meaning, not causal explanation as Freud himself thinks.” The father of psychoanalysis, we are told, fell into a “confusion of meaning connections with causal connections.”