Psychoanalysis as a creative shaping process2

The author first explains the concepts of creativity, play and aesthetic experience. He then outlines the psychoanalytic process as a creative one that shapes reality. Making a link between psychoanalysis and the humanities, he demonstrates that creative play is a fundamental aspect of the human experience of reality. Aesthetic experiences during the psychoanalytic process are comparable to the play by which children structure their world and artists' activity in following their urge to shape. Furthermore it is shown that creative actualisation testifies to a quasi‐biological need for coherence and structure. Through modern hermeneutics, the truth claims of aesthetic shaping can be established in epistemological terms. The basic principles of hermeneutics‐historicity, linguisticity and communicative experience‐find their psychoanalytic counterparts in memory, representational shaping and transference‐countertransference. Psychoanalysis is demonstrated to be simultaneously a science and an art. On the basis of a case history, aesthetic experience is shown to constitute a specific and unique form of access to psychic reality. Aesthetic experience and creativity do not only aid recovery from ‘bad psychological states’, they are also indispensable for the entire understanding of internal and external reality. It is possible to develop this understanding through a creative psychoanalytic attitude.     

医学阐释学--医学哲学研究新视角

医学阐释学是哲学阐释学在医学领域的应用,是医学与哲学交叉的一个新领域.简述哲学阐释学的发展以及其主要观点,并集中讨论了医学阐释学研究的范畴,其中包括:人体的现象学、健康和病患的意义、医患关系、生命伦理学、医学的目的.指出医学阐释学对医学哲学、医学人文科学研究的影响.     

自本体与对本体:中西哲学的诠释学基础

中西哲学的根本性差异是自本体思维与对本体思维的差异。所谓自本体的思维,是认为认知对象与认知主体无法分开,强调本体的自我呈现。而对本体思维则首先将存在视之为客观实有,然后去探究这客观实有的真实。自本体思维与对本体思维都是人的二重性存在的客观反映。对于对本体方式来说,它重视对人的工具理性式的生存状态的探究,而自本体则关心人作为价值理性的生存状态的探究。由于人的工具性层面与价值性层面不仅相互补充与依存,而且会相互涵摄,因此,未来哲学的发展,要求我们同时采取自本体思维与对本体思维的方式;而所谓中西哲学的融会与贯通,是指它们在各自保持自身的诠释学传统的基础上,同时理解与吸收对方的诠释学立场与传统。     

The Canonical Sense of Scripture: Trinitarian or Christocentric?

Abstract: In this essay I develop a threefold sense for Scripture today: conventional, canonical, and contemporary. This is my “grammar” for evangelical theological hermeneutics. I explore in particular the canonical sense: the level of meaning of the biblical passage read in the light of the whole of Scripture, with Christ as the center and key. In dialogue with the Orthodox, I argue that such a christocentric approach must also be, finally, a Trinitarian one.     

Hermeneutics of Clinical Practice: The Question of Textuality

In this article I scrutinize the question whetherclinical medicine, in order to be considered ahermeneutical enterprise, must be thought of as areading of different texts. Three differentproposals for a definition of the concept of text inmedicine, suggested by other hermeneuticians, arediscussed. All three proposals are shown to beunsatisfying in various ways. Instead of attempting tofind a fourth definition of the concept of textsuitable to a hermeneutics of medicine, I then try toshow that the assumption that one needs to operatewith the concept of text in order to develop ahermeneutics of medicine is false. Clinicalinterpretation can be shown to essentially consist ina dialogical hermeneutics, the pattern of which can befound in the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thiskind of hermeneutics is not a methodology of textreading, but an ontological, phenomenologicalhermeneutics in which understanding is a necessaryfeature of the being-together of human beings in theworld. This being-together in and through languagetakes on a peculiar form in the clinical encounter,since the medical meeting is typically characterizedby an asymmetrical enstrangement and has a specificgoal – health for the patient – absent in other formsof hermeneutics. Central issues of Gadamer'sphilosophy, e.g. fusion of horizons, are shown tofit the structure of clinical practice.     

Mathematics and Spiritual Interpretation: A Bridge to Genuine Interdisciplinarity

This article is a spiritual interpretation of Leonhard Euler's famous equation linking the most important entities in mathematics: e (the base of natural logarithms), π (the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle), i (√‐1),1 , and . The equation itself (e^πi+1 = 0> ) can be understood in terms of a traditional mathematical proof, but that does not give one a sense of what it might mean. While one might intuit, given the significance of the elements of the equation, that there is a deeper meaning, one is not in a position to get at that meaning within the discipline of mathematics itself. It is only by going outside of mathematics and adopting the perspective of theology that any kind of understanding of the equation might be gained, the significant implication here being that the whole mathematical field might be a vast treasure house of insights into the mind of God. In this regard, the article is a response to the monograph by George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (2000), which attempts to approach mathematics in general and the Euler equation in particular in terms of some basic principles of cognitive psychology. It is my position that while there may be an external basis for understanding mathematics, the results are somewhat disappointing and fail to reveal the full measure of meaning buried within that equation.     

Hermeneutics of Medicine in the Wake of Gadamer: the Issue of Phronesis

The relevance of the Aristotelian concept ofphronesis – practical wisdom – for medicine and medical ethics has been much debated during the last two decades. This paper attempts to show how Aristotle’s practical philosophy was of central importance toHans-Georg Gadamer and to the development of his philosophical hermeneutics, and how,accordingly, the concept of phronesiswill be central to a Gadamerian hermeneutics of medicine. If medical practice is conceived of as an interpretative meeting between doctor and patient with the aim of restoring the health of the latter, then phronesis is the mark of the good physician, who through interpretation comes to know the best thing todo for this particular patient at this particular time. The potential fruitfulness of this hermeneutical appropriation of phronesis for the field of medical ethics is also discussed. The concept can be (and has been) used in critiques of the conceptualization of bioethics as the application of principle-based theory to clinical situations, since Aristotle’s point is exactly that problems of praxis cannot be approached in this way. It can also point theway for alternative forms of medical ethics, such as virtue ethics or a phenomenological andhermeneutical ethics. The latter alternative would have to address the phenomena of healthand the good life as issues for medical practice. It would also have to map out in detail the terrain of the medical meeting and the acts of interpretation through which phronesis is exercised. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Can there be a science of the symbolic?

Science means not just 'knowing', but knowing verified by replicability. Science is particularly hard to bring to depth psychology because the individual uniquenesses that can't be repeated are what make people most deeply themselves. Everyone, including the analytic investigator, however, has a science, in the sense of a world-view that is replicated by experience. Jung offered hermeneutics as an alternative mode to science for getting to know the psychological subject. But as Heidegger emphasized, hermeneutics always begins with the projection of a world-view, i.e., the science of the would-be interpreter. In the analytic situation, dialogue is available to test the world-view and enlarge its horizon, in accord with Gadamer's expansion of hermeneutics, 'the classical discipline concerned with the art of understanding texts', into a method of inquiry open to the possibilities of otherness. An example is given from an analytic training seminar, in which the author began by projecting his version of the theory of psychological types onto the dream material a candidate offered in response to the seminar. A dialogue with the candidate ensued which enabled the teacher to correct his original, somewhat rigid, application of his scientific viewpoint. In such a dialogue, psyche emerges as the final interpreter of what is, generating hypotheses that can fruitfully be applied to the understanding of other cases.