Psychoanalysis and social research of deep hermeneutics

Abstract

The starting point for this paper is the critique of psychoanalysis by Theodor W. Adorno. Not even Freud has understood well the complex mediation between individual and society, having overemphasised the individual in his analyses of cultural critique. The central field of investigation of psychoanalysis is the unconscious, a concept that both psychology and the social sciences go back to discussing, and in a controversial manner. Is there really such a phenomenon as the unconscious? When one is, as was Freud, able to conceive as scientific research the many thousands of psychoanalyses realised in the form of individual therapies, then the unconscious phenomenon exists beyond any positivistic conception that denies it. Adorno, however, correctly adds that, in opposition to psychoanalysis’ dominant pedagogical position, this is not just about an individual phenomenon, but also about a general social phenomenon. Frankfurtian psychoanalyst Alfred Lorenzer recast such critical conception of the unconscious in particularly methodological terms. In the social non-clinical field, he developed the psychoanalysis of deep hermeneutics as a method of investigation for the social and cultural sciences. In this paper we present deep hermeneutics in its relation with psychoanalysis. The final section presents an example of deep hermeneutics of social processes. Interpretation seeks to apprehend issues of violence and solidarity in youth gangs. The aim is to understand particular forms of interaction whose roots, though found in early childhood, simultaneously determine in very concrete ways present actions.