The Influence of Psychotherapeutic Practices on a Hermeneutics of Discourse

Summary

In laying out principles and practices of psychoanalysis and narrative therapy, this paper clarifies distinct forms of therapy as hermeneutics of discourse. The development of psychoanalytic practice is traced from authoritarian to dialogical access of deep experience. Meaning advances recursively as it is both unmasked and restored. Narrative therapy, by contrast, challenges subjugated, oppressive discourses. Its practices emphasize the generation of new meaning, mutually constructed by therapist and client. Although hermeneutics leaves discourse continually open to re-interpretation, understanding is not held to be constructed, but rather shared in relations of desire. A hermeneutics of discourse highlights psychotherapy as a forum for understanding, emphasizing how it is that the persons involved in therapy specify both the possibility and the limits of understanding. Understanding is radically contextual, dependent not only on the practices of therapy, but on the persons involved in interpreting those practices. The limits involved in shared meaning create the conditions which make understanding possible.