Existential psychotherapy, interpretation and gadamars of hermeneutic circle
Existential psychotherapy, interpretation and gadamars of hermeneutic circle
The existential approach to psychotherapy has enjoyed growing popularity in Great Britain for almost thirty years. Nevertheless, among other things, very little is known about what the existential approach is actually and how his practitioners actually work with clients. In this article, I would like to sketch the existential phenomenological approach to interpretation and an approach to interpretation, which is referred to as a hermeneutic circle as easily as possible.
The hermeneutic circle is a method of interpretation that the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamar developed in his work Truth and Method in 1960. It is an important work in the history of the continental philosophy of the 20th century. Unfortunately, it is not known outside of philosophical circles, maybe it is because it is overshadowed by being and time, the famous and radical work by Gadamar's teacher Martin Heidegger. Existential psychotherapy is of enormous importance, and in this article I would like to show why.
Gadamar's interest in Hermeneutics: the study of the theory and practice of interpretation. In truth and method to find out his goal, which makes an interpretation successful or unsuccessful. Hermeneutics can be seen as a kind of science or more precisely as a soft science of interpretation. The fact that I used the expression "soft science" is in no way depressed. It may be an unfortunate turn, but the hermeneutic project of Gadamar is about developing a method to find out something about the human world. Rather the world of signs and symbols than the natural world.
Not everything in life can or must be learned from the physical world and science or from “facts”. Well, if someone suggests that the only the way to learn something is made of facts. Ultimately, your argument leads to the argument that you cannot learn anything from art. Simply put, that's a lie. We are constantly learning from the world of signs and symbols, just as we learn something from Shakespeare. It is something that is not grasped by or in the world of 'facts' or cannot be recorded. This is where hermeneutics come into play: it asks what and how we from the human world, our immediate world, the world we actually learn to be in or around Heidegger's concept for people in the world, existence.
Since I mention Heidegger, I should also highlight a key element that Gadamar borrowed from Heidegger. His idea of temporality. Heidegger's temporality theory initially says that human time experience is finally: will end. In addition, he argues that time should not be considered linear. Instead, Heidegger argues, a person experiences a past, present and the future at the same time.
In this conception, the past is always with us, but when we move over time, we constantly move away and alienate ourselves from our past from our own culture. So we inevitably pull the past with us, keep rethinking it, inevitably reinterpret them and make them relevant for what we are today.
When I met Shakespeare for the first time as a child, I hated it. As a teenager, that had changed, and now I find some of it fantastic and it means something completely different for me. It is also open how I interpret Shakespeare in the future. There is no final interpretation I will come through the work of Shakespeare.
While this seems incredibly obvious on the one hand, we see something completely different when we compared it to the enlightenment of Hegel. For Hegel and for the enlightenment, the modernist and Freudian therapy, we move to one point; A moment of the story when we find the interpretation. At Gadamer there is no movement towards a final understanding, but a movement away from our own alienation from our personal history, our background and our culture. There is no final point at the end of the story: we move back and forth or rather in a circle that revolves the culture through our experience and reinterpretation.
This temporality of experience offers us the opportunity to regain art and our lives for ourselves. It is the act of growth and change, while society grows around us and changes, enables interpretation. It is our new visit that enables the reinterpretation and the process of uncovering the truth.
The view of interpretation as a circle and not linear differentiates the existential psychotherapy from other types of therapy. Existential, the past of the customers is not considered firmly, since the way in which customers remember the past from their own presence is flexible and open to changes. An existential psychotherapist would promote a variety of interpretations of clients from his past, whereby an analyst would rather look for an interpretation that shows the explanation for the special way of a client in the world. Of course I speak here in general, and there are many types of psychoanalysts and many branches of psychoanalytic theory. However, I believe that by emphasizing the use of the hermeneutic circle as an interpretation method, it becomes clear how much the Freudian theory is based on ideas of education and modernist conception, whereby an existential approach enables a more contemporary understanding of what it is human.
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