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personalities. He attributed this correlation to what he called the
'identity theme', thus re-echoing American ego-psychologists. The
serious blunder he made is, to my mind, that he stripped the work of
its 'thematic unity' and conferred it upon the reader's 'personal
identity'.
The hermeneutic approach to translation is basad on a rejectionist
attitude towards the source text. This attitude is indefensible in
view of the role Pierre Maranda assigns to the reader. Maranda, ( The
Dialectic of Metaphor , in The Reader in the Text , (ed.) S R
Suleiman and I Crosman, 1980, p190), delimits the reader's role to
either interpreting or accepting what the text offers. According to
this view, "to interpret is to accept what we recognize, while
filtering out what is incompatible with our own semantic charter.
Acceptance is an outgrowth of narcissism, which is itself a survival
mechanism. For Freud, narcissism is the network of structure that
enables people to define and maintain their identities both rationally
and emotionally and, consequently, to perpetuate themselves."
Acceptance, in the Freudian sense, is by no means acceptable; for it is
more a self-assurance than a survival mechanism unless it is harnessed
to religious, political or economic dogmatism. It is the 'filtering
out of what is incompatible with one's semantic charter' that can be
considered a 'survival mechanism'. What is significantly relevant to
hermeneutics is the interpretive approach to reading. Defense
mechanism is harnessed to the postulate that culture is superior to
nature. Islam and Christianity emphasize the dominance of man over
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