ABSTRACT
Hermeneutic understanding is much broader in scope, a process in which, at a fundamental level, human beings understand, manage, and shape their individual and social realities. Hermeneutics is both a theory and an art, the art of human understanding, above and beyond proclamation, explanation, and interpretation: Thus hermeneutics is more than a scientific method and much more than a designation of a certain group of scientific approaches. The understanding of understanding in antiquity is all-encompassing in the sense proposed by Hans Georg Gadamer. In the Middle Ages, this universality was split up and restricted to specific hermeneutic approaches—theological, philological, legal. The historicity of knowledge and experience is the first basic assumption on which hermeneutics rests. The language in which historical experience materializes is of a special kind. Unfortunately, language is frequently misunderstood in counselling and psychotherapy as a system of signs exclusively serving the communication of information.
