ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the paths opened to contemporary philosophy by what could be called the graft of the hermeneutic problem onto the phenomenological method. The hermeneutic problem is thus seen from the perspective of psychology: to understand, for a finite being, is to be transported into another life. The preceding analysis, dealing with the semantic structure of expressions with double or multiple meanings, is the narrow gate through which hermeneutic philosophy must pass if it does not want to cut itself off from those disciplines which, in their method, turn to interpretation: exegesis, history, and psychoanalysis. The existence that psychoanalysis discovers is that of desire; it is existence as desire, and this existence is revealed principally in an archaeology of the subject. The realism of the unconscious, the topographic and economic treatment of representations, fantasies, symptoms, and symbols, appears finally as the condition of a hermeneutics free from the prejudices of the ego.
