ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with psychoanalysis and hermeneutics. The hermeneutic project is taken to be reason understands comprehension of an exterior object. The chapter discusses a metapsychological level some issues central to the psychoanalytic experience in the light of such an existential hermeneutics. Interpreting is founded upon the symbolic function and includes such acts as speaking, dreaming, fantasying, narrating, or even heedful action. It differs from reflexes, spontaneous rejection, or instinctive blows, which all rather betray an unwillingness to interpret and thus also to know. The demand for perceptual identity is intimately connected with a demand for immediacy. The demand for perceptual identity has the same compelling character as the unchecked satisfaction that any demand or desire would entail, and the secondary process arises precisely in order to handle the degree of adjustment needed to rectify the lack of correspondence with reality.
