ABSTRACT
In the early 1970s, Lionel Trilling made the following observation: “At the present there is a withdrawal of credence from Freudian theory. This development cannot be ascribed to any simple cause, but the contemporary disenchantment with narration as a way of explaining things surely has some bearing upon it.” To understand the inherent difference between social-psychological, or rather phenomenological, narrativism, according to which people possess a dialogic free will to tell and retell their life stories in different versions as often as they want, and the dialectic narrativity in which one person manipulates another person to internalize one fundamentalistic interpretation of his biography, one has to trace the genesis of hermeneutics as a guiding philosophy of a multiplicity of disciplines. Ricoeur differentiated between two diametrically opposed kinds of hermeneutics. At one pole, hermeneutics is understood as a restoration of meaning; and at the other pole, hermeneutics is used as a tactic of suspicion.
