ABSTRACT
Asked to name the distinctly Jungian hermeneutic for the puzzling form and substance of dreams, active imaginings and cultural artefacts such as films, paintings and poetry, most Jungians – analysts and academics alike – would likely answer: ‘the hermeneutic of amplification’. The amplification it performs comes about by proposing functional parallels in the transpersonal register to initially puzzling or otherwise opaque personal or cultural materials (Jung 1936: para. 103).1 This hermeneutic stands in sharp contrast to the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur, to designate a common defining element in the interpretative work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud (Ricoeur 1970: 32-36).2 Nietzsche perhaps most radically expresses the motivation underlying this hermeneutic when he states that ‘every word is a masking’ (Hayman 1980: 291).3 If this is a true statement, it is a truth that is itself a masking, insofar as Nietzsche’s universal affirmative claim must necessarily apply to its own words. (What kind of truth is it that masks, rather than reveals, we can well ask; and what is it masking?) Nonetheless – and with an irony approaching paradoxical status when placed in relation to Nietzsche’s claim – the point of the hermeneutic of suspicion is to unmask the myriad forms of deception directed towards others, as well as the putatively ubiquitous forms of self-deception performed by persons, including forms of alleged ‘false consciousness’. Classical psychoanalytic dream theory’s differentiation of the manifest dream from the latent dream is an instance of this hermeneutic, insofar as the manifest dream is suspected of masking the latent dream, whose substance, being Oedipal, is repressed because it violates the incest taboo. The hermeneutic work of the psychoanalyst is to unmask this unsavoury fact, heretofore repressed.
