The Suffering Stranger

Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice

Donna M. Orange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781135184117
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2012 Gradiva Award!

Utilizing the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas, The Suffering Stranger invigorates the conversation between psychoanalysis and philosophy, demonstrating how each is informed by the other and how both are strengthened in unison. Orange turns her critical (and clinical) eye toward five major psychoanalytic thinkers – Sándor Ferenczi, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, D. W. Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, and Bernard Brandchaft – investigating the hermeneutic approach of each and engaging these innovative thinkers precisely as interpreters, as those who have seen the face and heard the voice of the other in an ethical manner. In doing so, she provides the practicing clinician with insight into the methodology of interpretation that underpins the day-to-day activity of analysis, and broadens the scope of possibility for philosophical extensions of psychoanalytic theory.

1

What Is Hermeneutics?

The person who is understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unaffected but rather he thinks along with the other from the perspective of a specific bond of belonging, as if he too were affected.

—Gadamer

Hermeneutics? It may seem strange for someone as allergic to jargon as my students know me to be to embark on a book about an experience-distant term like hermeneutics. Still, I plead for its admission to our conversation on the grounds that it will help us tremendously to understand what we do as clinicians and to discern the different spirits in which we may approach what we do. So let us begin to approach the word itself.*

Hermeneutics, the study of interpretation, historically functioned as an adjunct discipline, first to theology and later to history, literature, and jurisprudence. Richard Palmer (2002), historian of hermeneutics, wrote a genial history of the origins of the word:

Hermes, you will recall from the Iliad and the Odyssey, was the messenger of the gods. He carried messages from Zeus to everybody else, especially from the divine realm and level down to the human level. In doing so, he had to bridge an ontological gap, a gap between the thinking of the gods and that of humans. According to legend, he had (1) a mysterious helmet which could make him invisible and then suddenly reappear, (2) magical wings on his sandals to carry him swiftly over long distances, and (3) a magical wand that could put you to sleep or wake you up. So he not only bridged physical distances and the ontological gap between divine and human being, he bridged the difference between the visible and the invisible, and between dreams and waking, between the unconscious and the conscious. He is the quicksilver god [“Mercury” in Latin] of sudden insights, ideas, inspirations. And he is also the trickster god of thefts, highway robbery, and of sudden windfalls of good luck. Norman O. Brown wrote a book about him titled Hermes the Thief. Hermes is the god of crossroads and boundaries, where piles of rocks (Herms) were placed to honor him. As psychopomp, Hermes led the dead into the underworld, so he “crossed the line” between the living and the dead, between the living human world and the underworld of Hades. Hermes is truly the “god of the gaps,” of the margins, the boundaries, the limins of many things. (p. 2)

Originally the study of methods for interpreting sacred texts, hermeneutics served theological purposes. From the time of the early 19th-century romantics, it broadened its scope to include history, aesthetics, and whatever belonged to the humanities and social sciences generally. Given Freud’s emphasis on interpretation, it might have seemed obvious that psychoanalysis would have been seen as a hermeneutic study.* Unfortunately, because of his even stronger insistence on the status of psychoanalysis as natural science, our awareness of psychoanalysis as hermeneutics has arrived only more recently, and with some reasonable cautions (Friedman, 2000; Steiner, 1995). Furthermore, other psychotherapeutic traditions, needing to distance themselves from what they have understood—with considerable justification—as an excessively intellectualized interpretive therapeutics in psychoanalysis, have also missed out on what a hermeneutic sensibility can offer.^†

In the hands of phenomenologists, first Martin Heidegger but principally Hans-Georg Gadamer, hermeneutics became a general philosophy of dialogical understanding, serving philosophy, the social sciences, and beyond. Now, I suggest, dialogical hermeneutics can become the partner of an ethical clinical sensibility and sense of vocation best expressed in the ethical phenomenology of Emmanuel Lévinas, in whose thinking each of us bears an infinite responsibility to the face of the suffering stranger.

This book therefore has a double task: (a) to explain and illustrate the richness of a hermeneutic clinical sensibility and (b) to illustrate that such a sensibility responds well to the ethical imperative of hospitality to the suffering stranger that we find described in the challenging writings of Emmanuel Lévinas.

This project thus approaches hermeneutics in three ways: (a) it attempts to trace the history of hermeneutics in a user-friendly way so that humanistic psychotherapists of all traditions can recognize their work as hermeneutic and make use of the resources that philosophical hermeneutics offers, (b) it studies work of several especially humanistic psychoanalysts—because this is my own tradition—to show both how these clinicians developed a hermeneutic therapeutics and how a dialogic hermeneutics understands both persons and texts, and (c) it links a dialogic clinical hermeneutics to an ethical concern, shared by these clinicians and by the philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Emmanuel Lévinas, for the voice and the face of the other.

History of Hermeneutics: Schleiermacher

Let us begin with the hermeneutics of the courageous* romanticera theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), German theologian and philosopher, contemporary of Goethe and Beethoven, an important resource for the so-called hermeneutic turn in contemporary psychoanalysis.

The contemporary or post-Freudian psychoanalysis to which I refer includes British independents and American relationalists, made up, broadly speaking, of interpersonalists, psychoanalytic self psychologists, as well as phenomenologically oriented intersubjectivists and many clinicians worldwide inspired by various relational ideas. We have largely turned away from Freud’s natural-science-based psychoanalysis whose “interpretations” explained to the patient* his or her instinct-based complexes and conflicts. The analyst used to be the silent and distant expert authority on the patient’s unconscious conflicts over sex and aggression, the archaeologist/excavator of the depths. Now, instead, most of us work dialogically, hoping more to understand suffering via its background in lived intersubjective experience than to explain or translate unconscious “mental” contents. We believe that our groping together for words for whatever we can come to understand becomes a healing and a liberating process. We realize that the analyst’s personal history, our own intimate Selbstvertrautheit (Frank, 2000),^† is involved at every moment in our effort to contact and to understand the suffering other (Orange, 1995) and that the other in turn is always affecting us. Our thinking and our practice has changed profoundly from the distant and impersonal world of what we often call “classical” psychoanalysis.

So what has Schleiermacher to offer us, beyond the example of a man who was willing to place himself at risk for people^‡ whom others considered less than fully human? I have chosen three themes: (a) his recognition that understanding is hard, if not impossible, work; (b) what I would call his proto-fallibilism; and (c) his insistence on holism, or what today we might call complexity, an attitude that resists the enticements of reductionism that continue to tempt clinicians.

Schleiermacher taught that understanding, whether of texts or of people, was hard work and always work in progress. Because every child learns a language, and because so much of daily life passes without our noticing misunderstandings, he had to tell us explicitly that “misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point” (Schleiermacher & Kimmerle, 1977, p. 110). In contrast to what he called the “lax practice” of hermeneutics, which assumes understanding (Schleiermacher & Bowie, 1998), the “rigorous practice” or “strict practice” always required this hardworking attitude. In my clinical experience, patients are often greatly surprised and relieved when I quote this to them; they have expected themselves to understand their spouses and their partners to understand them, and likewise their analysts or therapists. To see that understanding requires hard effort, and that this should be expected, is already a start in hermeneutics. This work requires, Schleiermacher taught, constant attention to both content and feeling tone of whatever we seek to understand. Moreover, this rigorous practice is a no-fault enterprise: “Non-understanding is partly indeterminacy, partly ambiguity of the content. So it is thought of without any fault on the part of the utterer” (Schleiermacher & Bowie, 1998, p. 227). He seems to have believed that if I want to understand I must go toward the utterer, not force the utterer to come to me. Not surprisingly, then, my interest in hermeneutics helps me to work with patients who suffer from dreadful, even suicidal, forms of shame: If everything is just something to understand, not to despise or to blame, my patients’ self-hatred sometimes gives way to a more self-forgiving Selbstvertrautheit (self-familiarity, sense of being at home with oneself).

Even the psychotherapist’s struggles to understand patterns of seemingly intractable misery can become more bearable in light of this “rigorous practice.” My patient who seems to have everything, including everything that I have never had, but continues to return to a truly abusive partner, one who throws hot soup on her in anger and rages at her in front of friends and family, confounds me. Then I remember that understanding is a difficult practice and that there is clearly something we have not understood together yet. Yes, Schleiermacher helps.

Indeed, Schleiermacher claimed elsewhere, no one, strictly speaking, can understand another person. What can this mean? Schleiermacher held that the art of hermeneutics had two indispensible elements, the grammatical and the psychological:

In order to complete the grammatical side of interpretation it would be necessary to have complete knowledge of the language. In order to complete the psychological side it would be necessary to have a complete knowledge of the person. Since in both cases such complete knowledge is impossible, it is necessary to move back and forth between the grammatical and psychological sides, and no rules can stipulate exactly how to do this. (Schleiermacher & Kimmerle, 1977, p. 100)

This brings us to our second theme. He replaced confidence in Cartesian “clear and distinct ideas” with awareness that all our understanding is partial and fallible, that it comes piecemeal and in degrees. It may be that Schleiermacher’s famous or infamous method of intuitive understanding embodied this proto-fallibilism. If, perhaps, he meant that the interpreter makes a reasonable guess, taking historical and other forms of context into account, at the meaning of a text, and then tests it out, this would be very similar to the method of hypothesis in Charles Sanders Peirce (1931). Taking a dream as a text, for example, a clinician might ask whether being chased feels like anything in previous or current life, and work from there. One always intends interpretation as tentative and fallible. Schleiermacher even termed his oscillating intersubjective search for truth—in Plato’s spirit—dialectic.

In clinical work, we work in this spirit hundreds of times a day, testing, discarding, and provisionally keeping our hunches. The famous “squiggle” game of British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott (1971), in which both patient and analyst added lines to a drawing until something emerged, was a form of hermeneutic play, I think. Many of us psychoanalysts probably do the same thing with words as we wonder together about symptoms, dreams, daydreams, bits of traumatic memory, and such. Whenever the understanding seems adequate for the moment, or unable to be taken further for the moment, we let it go for the moment. In this way both patient and analyst become fallibilists, less obsessive about being right and certain, less caught in traumatically generated either–or positions (Orange, 2011). Knowing gradually becomes disengaged from the search for certainty and becomes a shared project.

In Schleiermacher’s own words, in his explanation of the “psychological” aspects of hermeneutic understanding, we find the following, written at least 130 years before Winnicott’s squiggle or before Gadamer’s dialogic hermeneutics:

If we consider a conversation, this is first of all a completely free state, which is based, not on any specific objective intention, but only on the mutually stimulating exchange of thoughts. … But the conversation does easily get fixed on something and that is even striven for by both sides. In this way a common development of thoughts and a particular relationship of the utterances of the one to the other arises. … But a conversation also allows breaks. … The task is to get to know the genesis of such breaks. … We must go back to the psychological and seek to explain what determines precisely the free, or rather involuntary manner of combination. In doing so we must base this on our own observation of ourself. … The most natural thing here is to think of oneself in the state of meditation in such a way that a certain tendency towards the distraction of thoughts is present as an inhibition … here it is a question of that free play of ideas in which our will is passive though mental being is still active. (Schleiermacher & Bowie, 1998, pp. 124–125)

Here we easily find intimations of the play space Winnicott—influenced by the English romantics, though he may never have read Schleiermacher—would, more than a century later, find so full of creative possibility for development and analysis: “The more freely we let ourselves go in this manner, the more the state is analogous to dreaming, and dreaming is that which is simply incomprehensible, precisely because it does not follow any law of content and therefore appears merely contingent” (p. 125).

This passage makes it clear that Schleiermacher had no simplistic walk-in-the-other’s-moccasins, enter-the-other’s-mind conception of empathy (Einfühlung).* Instead, like Schleiermacher’s hermeneut, psychoanalysts note the ways we find ourselves bound and inhibited in our thinking and feeling with the patient. Thus we come to understand the patient’s world, the language we speak together, and the sources of our misunderstandings. We engage in something like what he called “reconstructing the meditation,” almost dreaming together, understanding how the other or we together arrived where we arrived. Schleiermacher’s famous claim to know the author better than he knew himself then seems less arrogant and far more dialogic, fallibilistic, and capable of being useful to always-learning psychoanalysts. “In general,” Schleiermacher noted,

it is the case that the more someone has observed themselves and others in relation to the activity of thought, the more they also have the hermeneutic talent … the more difficult the hermeneutic task is, the more its completion demands collective work; the more the necessary conditions are lacking, the more individual directions must unite to complete the task. (Schleiermacher & Bowie, 1998, p. 128)

Similarly, just as a good exegete (biblical interpreter) needs other commentaries on a biblical text, we psychoanalysts benefit greatly by long experience and self-knowledge but never lose the need for consultation and collaboration with trusted colleagues. (We also see that Schleiermacher generally made an easy shift back and forth between understanding texts and understanding people; for him the problems and processes were quite similar.)

We have seen that Schleiermacher believed interpretation and understanding to be hard work and to require humility and fallibilistic acknowledgment of the limits of our understanding. From Schleiermacher we can learn, thirdly, a holistic attitude, that is, to embrace complexity and refuse the sirens of reductionism, constant temptations even for post-Freudians. The two current attractions consist in “evidence-based treatment” (the idea that all forms of therapy should be experimentally testable for efficacy) and the worship of neuroscience (a new journal is called Neuropsychoanalysis). The first attempts to justify the time and expense that meaning-oriented “talking cures” require as compared with psychopharmacology and short-term cognitive-behavioral treatments, effective as they may be for immediate symptom relief. The second appeals to psychoanalysts themselves who are easily persuaded that now, finally, our work is scient...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. What Is Hermeneutics?
• Chapter 2. The Suffering Stranger and the Hermeneutics of Trust
• Chapter 3. Sándor Ferenczi: The Analyst of Last Resort and the Hermeneutics of Trauma
• Chapter 4. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann: Incommunicable Loneliness
• Chapter 5. D. W. Winnicott: Humanitarian Without Sentimentality
• Chapter 6. Heinz Kohut: Glimpsing the Hidden Suffering
• Chapter 7. Bernard Brandchaft: Liberating the Incarcerated Spirit
• Afterword: The Next Step
• References
• Index