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  • Psychoanalysis, Narrative, and HermeneuticsAn Integrative Account
  • Roger Frie (bio)

In the public eye psychoanalysis has long been identified with Sigmund Freud, while for literary scholars it is increasingly linked with Jacques Lacan. The focus of this article is neither Freud nor Lacan, but the tradition of hermeneutics in psychoanalysis that traces its roots to the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger, who was the first to integrate psychoanalysis with hermeneutical philosophy. Following Paul Ricoeur’s (1970) work on the nature of interpretation, the pairing of psychoanalysis and philosophy is no longer unusual. But Binswanger’s initial foray in the fields of phenomenology and hermeneutics was met with bewilderment, if not derision, not least from Freud himself. Freud looked at his younger colleague with pride, perceiving him as representing the future of the profession. It was thus with no small measure of disappointment that he received Binswanger’s long-promised monograph on the nature of psychoanalytic understanding in 1922. In his reply, Freud wrote: “What [End Page 119] are you going to do about the unconscious, or rather, how will you manage without the unconscious? Has the philosophical devil got you in its claws after all? Reassure me” (qtd. in Binswanger 1957: 64). In fact, Binswanger never dismissed the unconscious, but after his study of hermeneutics he conceived of unconscious experience differently.

In its initial inception the Freudian unconscious was seen as a distinct entity in the mind, consisting of repressed sexual and aggressive impulses and their derivatives. As a repository of hidden truths it inevitably became the focal point of the analytic process. Psychoanalysis was deceptively simple and straightforward: the analyst would excavate and interpret the contents of the unconscious, giving rise to a process of working through in which the patient would eventually master the intrusion of unconscious impulses into conscious life. Today it is widely accepted that the psychoanalytic process is considerably more complex. Freud’s archaeological conception has given way to diverse understandings of the unconscious. This diversity is illustrated by the cultural psychologist Katherine Ewing, whose position is surprisingly close to Binswanger’s and the approach I develop in this essay. According to Ewing,

The problem with the unconscious is that it tends to get reified, just like the “ego” or “the self ” gets reified. And it implies that there are things that are not accessible, they’re not visible—they are in some deep place that is far away . . . [or] far inside . . . [These things] may not be explicit, but they’re present. So I would rather use the word “the implicit” rather than “the unconscious,” or something that’s not articulated verbally. . . . Some phenomena can be perceived and experienced but not named. . . . An observer who’s sensitive to the implicit can see things in the interaction which the person they’re observing wouldn’t be able to tell them about explicitly. So it’s pretty analogous to thinking of culture as processes rather than culture as a thing that has to somehow be identified and reified. . . . The model I am talking about involves the idea that actions and meanings are highly contextualized, that the decentered subject is operating in terms of multiple cues in the environment.

(qtd. in Molino 2004: 89).

The decentered concept of mind that Ewing describes owes much to the recognition of the constitutive role of social and cultural factors. In the [End Page 120] words of the narrative psychologist Jerome Bruner (1990), selfhood is “distributed” and contextual in nature. When understood from the perspective of narrative, psychological experience is inseparable from the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which we exist. The notion that our lives are always and already circumscribed by society, culture, and history in ways that are outside our awareness is also a central tenet of modern hermeneutics. Together the narrative and hermeneutical traditions challenge the view of the unconscious as an individual container of experience, separate from the social and cultural surround. Using an interpretive stance, my aim is to discuss select aspects of narrative psychology, hermeneutical philosophy, and psychoanalysis in order to develop an account of the unconscious that is grounded in our narrative existence. I will suggest that we are embedded in narratives whose...

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