Abstract

A hermeneutic approach to understanding is one shared by religion and psychoanalysis, the latter having indicated its exegetical programme in the composite title of Freud's first major work Traumdeutung. We can say that hermeneutics is a dynamic approach to meaning which points to the primacy of language (Grondin 1995; Lacan 1984) and thus of being (Lacan 1988). That is to say, because language forms its substratum, understanding is fundamentally an ontological concern. It is an event we undergo, rather than a subjective act of meaning (Kisiel 1985; Lammi 1991). The double signification of language (Ricoeur 1970), which is implicit here, demands in the case of religion that we get under the surface of texts, beliefs, rituals or myths or, in the case of psychoanalysis, of dreams, symptoms or behaviours to reveal another sense, the hidden signification of experience in its historical and cultural context. Recognition of the distorted nature of language opens both religion and psychoanalysis to the inherent dangers of dualism (Lacan 2006). Coupled with this exegetical approach lies our understanding of religion or psychoanalysis itself, in which our ever changing evaluation forms a parallel hermeneutic. Thus we can divide research on texts or authors into various stages.