A narrative hermeneutics of psychotherapy: Paul Ricoeur and the understanding of meaning

The hermeneutic philosophy of Paul Ricoeur explains how reflecting and narrating existence for another can free one to the veracity of being. He reinterprets psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics and places the semantics of desire at the heart of psychotherapeutic narratives. In this dissertation I explores the value of psychotherapy as a dialogical forum in which therapist and patient seek to understand one another's desire. In the process of understanding, conflicts of interpretation arise and form new possibilities for meaning, as narratives come to be understood as more than what they represent. A narrative hermeneutics can thus account for how psychotherapy is meaningful. A hermeneutics also accounts for the innovative force of psychotherapy. But if interpretation and problems of meaning are central to the practice of psychotherapy then hermeneutics also speaks to the difficulty inherent to the evaluation of psychotherapy as a method of treatment. Hermeneutics in effect refocuses research from the evaluation of practices to the recognition of when psychotherapy practices are meaningful. The thesis of this dissertation reorients psychotherapy as a practice of meaning that is reflective of being in the world, making it incumbent on the psychotherapist and the psychotherapy researcher to reflect on the meaning of being in the world.