Existential psychotherapy, interpretation and Gadamar's hermeneutic circle

Existential psychotherapy, interpretation and Gadamar's hermeneutic circle

The existential approach to psychotherapy has been growing in popularity in the UK for almost thirty years. Despite this, among other therapy modalities, very little is known about what the existential approach actually is and how its practitioners actually work with clients. In this article I would like to outline as simply as possible the existential phenomenological approach to interpretation and an approach to interpretation called the hermeneutic circle.

The hermeneutic circle is a method of interpretation developed by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamar in his 1960 work Truth and Method. It is a significant work in the history of 20th century continental philosophy. Unfortunately, it is not known outside philosophical circles, perhaps because it is overshadowed by Being and Time, the famous and radical work of Gadamar's teacher Martin Heidegger. Existential psychotherapy is incredibly important, and in this article I want to show why.

Gadamar's interest lies in hermeneutics: the study of the theory and practice of interpretation. In truth and method its goal is to find out what makes an interpretation successful or unsuccessful. Hermeneutics can be viewed as a type of science or, more precisely, a soft science of interpretation. The fact that I used the term “soft science” is in no way depressing. It's perhaps an unfortunate twist, but Gadamar's hermeneutic project is about developing a method for finding out about the human world. the world of signs and symbols rather than the natural world.

Not everything in life can or needs to be learned from the physical world and science or from “facts”. Now if someone suggests that theonlyThe way to learn something is from facts. Your argument ultimately leads to the argument that you can't learn anything from art. Simply put, this is a lie. We are constantly learning from the world of signs and symbols, just as we learn from Shakespeare. It is something that is not or cannot be captured by or in the world of 'facts'. This is where hermeneutics comes into play: it asks what and how we learn from the human world, our immediate world, the world that we actually areBein or to use Heidegger's term for man in the world, Dasein.

Since I mention Heidegger, I should also highlight a key element that Gadamar borrowed from Heidegger. his idea of ​​temporality. Heidegger's theory of temporality states, first of all, that the human experience of time is finite: will end. Additionally and significantly, he argues that time should not be viewed as linear. Instead, Heidegger argues, a person experiences the past, present, and future simultaneously.

In this conception, the past is always with us, but as we move with time we are constantly moving away and becoming alienated from our past from our own culture. So we inevitably drag the past with us, constantly rethinking it, inevitably reinterpreting it and making it relevant to who we are today.

When I first encountered Shakespeare as a child, I hated it. As a teenager that had changed and now I think some of it is fantastic and it means something completely different to me. Furthermore, it is open to how I interpret Shakespeare in the future. There is nonefinalInterpretation I will come about the work of Shakespeare.

While on the one hand this seems incredibly obvious, when we contrast it with Hegel's enlightenment we see something completely different. For Hegel and for enlightenment, modernist and Freudian therapy, we are moving towards a point; A moment in history in which we find the interpretation. In Gadamer, there is not a movement toward a final understanding, but rather a movement away from our own alienation from our personal history, background, and culture. There is no definitive point to the end of the story: we move back and forth, or rather in a circle, re-appropriating the culture through our experience and reinterpretation.

This temporality of experience offers us the opportunity to reclaim art and our lives for ourselves. It is the act of growth and change as society grows and changes around us that allows for interpretation. It is our revisiting that enables the reinterpretation and process of uncovering the truth.

Viewing interpretation as circular and not linear is what differentiates existential psychotherapy from other types of therapy. Existentially, customers' pasts are not viewed as fixed because the way customers remember the past from their own present is flexible and open to change. An existential psychotherapist would encourage a variety of interpretations from clients of his or her past, whereas an analyst would be more likely to look for an interpretation that provides the explanation for a client's particular way in the world. Of course I am speaking in general terms here, and there are many types of psychoanalysts and many branches of psychoanalytic theory. However, I believe that by highlighting the use of the hermeneutic circle as a method of interpretation, it becomes clear how much Freudian theory is based on ideas from the Enlightenment and modernist conception, with an existential approach allowing a more contemporary understanding of what it is to be human.

Alternative practitioner psychotherapy

The best place to find alternative practitioners psychotherapy is in our free alternative practitioner directory. To view all alternative psychotherapy practitioners, please click here.