The Thick Bog of Metaphor and the New-Wave Hermeneutic Defense of Psychoanalysis

The Thick Bog of Metaphor and the New-Wave Hermeneutic Defense of Psychoanalysis Synopsis

Psychoanalysis, in Freud's day and our own, has met with and continues to meet with staunch opposition from critics-from philosophers of science, like Adolf Grünbaum, and psychoanalysts, like Robert Holt-who see empirical confirmation as a problem of scientific practice. If therapists cannot ground therapy in a theory that is scientifically verifiable and that has some degree of confirmation, what is the merit of psychoanalysis, or more generally, of any form of psychotherapy?

A common answer today, an apologia, is that psychotherapy is best understood as a hermeneutic discipline and not as a science. Psychotherapy, the arguments goes, is a shared experience between therapist and patient that aims at ontological disclosure, "hermeneutic truth", or deconstructive decoding, and that is not a matter of science. Is that answer viable?

This book maintains that today's hermeneutical apologia of psychotherapy is a dodge, not a defense. It offers therapists-chiefly through the thick bog of metaphor, often incomprehensible use of language, and ad hoc appropriation of hermeneutics-a refuge to buffer themselves from the possibility of criticism of the scientificity of their discipline.

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