Hermeneutics and psychoanalysis

Abstract

In this essay I evaluate the somewhat forced continuity that Paul Ricoeur perceives between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis, in order to prove that: 1. the discovery of the unconscious cannot be assimilated by any kind of knowledge, 2. psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to psychology nor to human sciences because they ignore desire, 3. since ambiguity of language itself is the cause of the unconscious, any interpretation of the unconscious must tend towards equivocation and poetics, 4. hermeneutics must come closer to the poetic source of the subject of the unconscious in order to reach a proximity with the analytic experience, and finally, 5. there is no continuity at all between hermeneutics and psychoanalysis; there can be fruitful dialogue between both discourses only on the basis of poetical hermeneutics.