Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

opens up worlds, meanings and connections (O'Dywer 2009). Subsequently new
hermeneutic approaches evolved which Alvesson and Sköland identify as objectivist
hermeneutics and alethic hermeneutics. In objectivist hermeneutics there is a clear divide
between the subject studying and the object studied, allowing for a degree of objectivity, but
does not claim scientific status. ‘Alethic hermeneutics dissolves the polarity between
subject and object into a primordial, original situation … the basic idea concerns the
revelation of something hidden, rather than the correspondence between subjective thinking
and objective reality’ (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000 57f.). Alethic hermeneutics combines
existential hermeneutics, poetic hermeneutics and a hermeneutics of suspicion linking the
work of Heidegger, Habermas, Ricoeur and others. Alvesson and Sköland offer an
integrative hermeneutic circle that unites objectivist and alethic perspectives by utilizing
intuition, empathy and the existential dimensions as common factors.
The interpretative approach adopted to answer the question identified earlier, is similarly
integrative, and spans the relative objectivity of a thematic narrative analysis and the
‘revelation of something hidden’, not known or re-discovered or experienced for the
interviewees alongside reflexive intersubjective dimensions (as seen in chapters twenty to
twenty-four). It can be described as a hermeneutic of translation, a form of hermeneutics
begun to purify the faith of believers … He who plumbs this movement to its depth will truly have taken on
Freudian iconoclasm in the very movement of faith’ (Ricoeur 1966: 36). Ricoeur’s ideas became embroiled in
a complex debate that dominated the early 1980s as to whether or not psychoanalysis is a science focusing on
objective truth or a technique focusing on the creation of subjective meaning. On the one hand Grunbaum, a
philosopher of science argued, like Popper, that psychoanalysis could not be classed as a science as its claims
cannot be refuted or falsified (Grunbaum 1984), a sceptical approach also adopted by Gellner writing as a
philosopher and social anthropologist (Gellner 2003). On the other hand Habermas argued that psychoanalysis
was a particular kind of science that uniquely included a hermeneutic reflexivity (Frosh 1999), a view
supported by Greenberg and Mitchell who argued that psychoanalysis was both a science and an interpretative
discipline (Greenberg and Mitchell 1983). Gomez offers an insightful critique of this dispute, concluding that
a psychoanalytic view of the person has its foundations in the nature of the soul/apparatus dichotomy of the
psyche (Gomez 2005).
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