Abstract
In the foreword to his 1968 work, Habermas, in addition to specifying that the function of psychoanalysis is illustrative in his theory, immediately clarifies that his knowledge of it “is limited to the study of Freud’s writings” (Habermas 1972, 8). Therefore, no other school of psychoanalysis, or any “practical experience of analysis”, is referenced in his work. However, he adds that the “Wednesday discussions” at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt played an important role for him. In particular, as previously mentioned, Alfred Lorenzer’s Sprachzerstörung und Rekonstruktion served as a fundamental reference.
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Notes
- 1.
“Initially, psychoanalysis appears only as a special form of interpretation. It provides theoretical perspectives and technical rules for the interpretation of symbolic structures. Freud always patterned the interpretation of dreams after the hermeneutic model of philological research” (Habermas 1972, 214).
- 2.
Original: “Ein verdorbener Text dieser Art kann in seinem Sinn zureichend erst erfaßt werden, nachdem es gelungen ist, den Sinn der Korruption selber aufzuklären: das bezeichnet die eigentümliche Aufgabe einer Hermeneutik, die sich auf die Verfahrensweisen der Philologie nicht beschränken kann, sondern Sprachanalyse mit der psychologischen Erforschung kausaler Zusammenhänge vereint”.
- 3.
See as a counterpart, a passage from Wege der psychoanalytischen Therapie (1919) in which Freud connects psychoanalytical work to chemical analysis, to orthopaedic or surgical incisions, and to an educator’s influence.
- 4.
In this regard, the following passage from Breuer and Freud’s Studien über Hysterie (1895) could be considered: “In other cases the connection [between the symptom and the occurrence which provoked it] is not so simple. It consists only in what might be called a ‘symbolic’ relation between the precipitating cause and the pathological phenomenon – a relation such as healthy people form in dreams. For instance, a neuralgia may follow upon mental pain or vomiting upon a feeling of moral disgust. We have studied patients who used to make the most copious use of this sort of symbolization” (Breuer and Freud 2000, 5).
- 5.
Other passages demonstrate that Habermas adheres to a broad interpretation of symbolism, such as the following: “The object domain of depth hermeneutics comprises all the places where, owing to internal disturbances, the text of our everyday language games is interrupted by incomprehensible symbols. These symbols cannot be understood because they do not obey the grammatical rules of ordinary language, norms of action, and culturally learned patterns of expression. They are either ignored and glossed over, rationalized through secondary elaboration (if they are not already the product of rationalizations), or reduced to external, somatic disturbances. Freud uses the medical term ‘symptom’ to cover such deviant symbol formations, which he studied in the dream as an exemplar” (Habermas 1972, 226).
- 6.
Consider, even, this passage: “Metapsychology deals with just as fundamental a connection: the connection between language deformation and behavioral pathology. In so doing, it presupposes a theory of ordinary language having two tasks: first, to account for the intersubjective validity of symbols and the linguistic mediation of interactions on the basis of reciprocal recognition; second, to render comprehensible socialization – that is, initiation into the grammar of language games – as a process of individuation. Since, according to this theory, the structure of language determines likewise both language and conduct, motives of action are also comprehended as linguistically interpreted needs. Thus motivations are not impulses that operate from behind subjectivity but subjectively guiding, symbolically mediated, and reciprocally interrelated intentions” (Habermas 1972, 255).
- 7.
In his La psicoanalisi come esercizio critico, Jervis underlines a similar conception; he says: “Psychoanalysis is not a strict therapeutic machine, or a standardised psychological itinerary like a process always identical to itself. On the contrary, it is a flexible instrument, adapted from the psychoanalyst to the singular patient, which is generally focused on specific interior psychological aspects” (Jervis 1994, 96; author’s translation).
- 8.
A schematic synthesis of Freud’s doctrine of evolution: at the beginning, psychoanalysis was a technique applied to analyse unconscious psychic contents through a work of excavation. Subsequently it worked analysing the Ego’s resistances that blocked the emersion of the removal. During these first two phases, psychoanalysis essentially works with the meanings of the anamnesis, of the past reconstruction, and of the work of interpretation as investigation (a procedure that Freud associated with archaeological work). After the discovery of the central function of transference in therapy, the interpretation of transference becomes the main instrument. It is in this last development that the concept of interpretation in psychoanalysis finds its full and particular determination. In fact, if during the two first moments psychoanalytical interpretation tends to work on a (predominantly) rational level, during the advanced phase it invests the entire sphere of the patient and analyst’s psychical life. At that time, Freud rejected his first idea of interpretation as Deutung for an idea of interpretation as Konstruieren. In his Konstruktionen in der Analyse he writes: ‘“If, in accounts of analytic technique, so little is said about “constructions”, that is because “interpretations” and their effects are spoken of instead. But I think that “construction” is by far the more appropriate description’” (Freud 1961e, 261).
- 9.
In his Einleitung der Behandlung, Freud says: “It is not difficult for a skilled analyst to read the patient’s secret wishes plainly between the lines of his complaints and the story of his illness; but what a measure of self-complacency and thoughtlessness must be possessed by anyone who can, on the shortest acquaintance, inform a stranger who is entirely ignorant of all the tenets of analysis that he is attached to his mother by incestuous ties, that he harbours wishes for the death of his wife whom he appears to love, that he conceals an intention of betraying his superior, and so on! I have heard that there are analysts who plume themselves upon these kinds of lightning diagnoses and ‘express’ treatments, but I must warn everyone against following such examples. […] Indeed, the truer the guess the more violent will be the resistance. As a rule the therapeutic effect will be nil; but the deterring of the patient from analysis will be final. Even in the later stages of analysis one must be careful not to give a patient the solution of a symptom or the translation of a wish until he is already so close to it that he has only one short step more to make in order to get hold of the explanation for himself” (Freud 1961c, 140).
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Busacchi, V. (2016). Reflexionswissenschaft versus Tiefenhermeneutik . In: Habermas and Ricoeur’s Depth Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39010-9_3
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