Hermeneutics and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.

Psychic or psychosomatic disorders--symptoms as well as the structures on the basis of which symptoms usually develop--include substantial impairment of communication. Psychogenic symptoms often seem incomprehensible and strange. Psychotherapy then involves the figuring out of the meaning of a symptom and, at the same time, the effecting of change in the sense of an enhancement of communication. Here, philosophic hermeneutics can point the way for psychotherapeutic reflection. Hermeneutics, when applied to psychotherapy, is the art of understanding and of making understood when the means of understanding and agreement between persons is disturbed. The psychotherapeutic process itself is executed within a "hermeneutic circle." A short case presentation illustrates the hermeneutic technique.