ABSTRACT
As clinicians searching for a better understanding of our patients, we are caught in the unremitting fl ow of the hermeneutic circle through which we interpret and reinterpret the events to which our patients are exposed. However, as Whitehead (1967) maintained, as theory builders, we are like the airplane that takes off from the ground, takes fl ight into speculative thoughts and returns to the reality of the land from which we started (see also Mesle, 2008). We must ground our speculations in the scientifi c realism that provides assurance that we will not stray far from the experiences we are trying to explain. Even as we formulate hypotheses that will help us understand our patients’ psychodynamics and plan interventions for their treatment, we must return to the data on which we base our speculations (Godfrey-Smith, 2003).
