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  • Key Concepts: Hermeneutics
  • James Phillips (bio)
Keywords

psychoanalysis, philosophy of science, nosology, classification

Hermeneutics is a concept whose breadth and significance have continued to grow in contemporary thought—and in psychiatry. Since its scope can be best appreciated through an historical overview of its development, I will begin there and then proceed to a discussion of its place in psychiatry. Derived from the Greek verb hermeneuein, which means “to interpret,” and the noun hermemeia, “interpretation” (and both associated with the god Hermes), the word was first used in the seventeenth century to mean biblical exegesis (Palmer 1969). The Protestant Reformation created a need to interpret the scriptures without the aid of church authority, and with the plurality of possible interpretations for any biblical text, a need arose to establish the principles of correct interpretation. Hermeneutics was the study of such principles. While the scope and content of the hermeneutical enterprise have changed vastly since these beginnings in biblical exegesis, the concept of hermeneutics retains its initial reference to the art and science of interpreting. In Palmer’s words, “Whenever rules and systems of explaining, understanding, or deciphering texts arise—there is hermeneutics” (1981, 458).

The scope of hermeneutics was broadened significantly in the nineteenth century through the philosophers Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey, who moved the focus of hermeneutical understanding from texts to all human productions—verbal and nonverbal, historical and current. For Dilthey the task was to respond to the nineteenth-century challenge that all knowledge must follow the model of the burgeoning physical sciences. He sought to secure for the humanist or cultural disciplines such as literature and history (the Geisteswissenschaften) a status that was different from but on par with that of the physical sciences (the Naturwissenschaften). To accomplish this he set about formulating the principles of understanding in each of the two kinds of disciplines. The methodology of understanding in the cultural sciences was modeled on the interpretation of a text and became the expanded notion of hermeneutics.

For Dilthey the core difference between the natural and cultural sciences lies in their respective objects of study—on the one hand an object in the world, on the other hand another person—and in the way we understand each. He summarized the difference with his categories of “explanation” (Erklären) and “understanding” (Verstehen). “The sciences explain nature, the human studies understand expressions of life” (1924, 144). Explanation [End Page 61] in the natural sciences comprehends its object through causal connections; it “knows” its object from the outside. The object remains alien to the human scientist. In contrast, understanding “knows” its object, a human being or a human production, from the inside. That is, I can know the inner life of another person because I also am a person. This is not a knowledge of causal connections but rather of a network of meanings, analogous to the network of meanings by which I understand myself (Dilthey 1883/1989).

Two points must be underlined about Dilthey’s treatment of hermeneutics as the methodology of understanding in the humanities. The first is that the understanding does not take place through introspection or intuition. I do not understand myself through introspection, and I do not understand the other through intuition. Rather, it is the nature of life to express itself, and it is through an understanding of these objectifications of inner life that we understand ourselves and others. Hermeneutics is then the study and method of understanding human expression. For Dilthey the triad of “life, expression, and understanding” defines the field of the human sciences. The second point is that because human life, lived experience, is temporal, the categories by which we understand man and human productions will have to involve this temporality. Self-understanding in the present, for instance, involves a historical reflection on those fixed expressions of others that form our common past.

Hermeneutic methodology as developed by Schleiermacher and Dilthey generated a series of unique concerns that characterize the hermeneutic approach to understanding. The first is that of the hermeneutic circle or round. At each level of hermeneutic investigation—a literary text, a historical monument, a person’s life—there is a part-whole structure in the understanding...

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