Editors' Introduction

Psychoanalysis and Hermeneutics: An Introduction

Abstract

An overview of the relationship between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics. We would like to open this introduction by confessing an initial ambition that we now see with a more critical eye. The idea that initially prompted the construction of this issue of Critical Hermeneutics was to rethink in a systematic way the relationship between these two disciplines that have constantly but ambivalently attracted each other, perhaps since the birth of the younger one: psychoanalysis. However, we realised that the goal of a systematic review of the relationship between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis is not yet feasible. There are too many directions that can be given to reflection. The works that have arrived – and which we will briefly present in the next paragraph – testify precisely to this polyphony of voices, sometimes dissonant, but fertile and innovative. Indeed, by moving in so many different directions – from clinic to art, from historiography to phenomenology, from ethics to textual analysis – the resulting picture contributes to broadening perspectives, but also suggests the epoché of any possible claim to synthesis...