Alfred Lorenzer and the depth-hermeneutic method

Abstract

This extended article aims to introduce an Anglophone audience to the work of Alfred Lorenzer. As such, it has three main components: it outlines some of Lorenzer's central concepts (the scenic, interaction forms, engrams, symbolisation and desymoblisation, language games and scenic understanding); explores the dialectical relations through which, for Lorenzer, unconscious, bodily and social processes are mutually constituted; and sketches some of the principles informing the depth-hermeneutic method, the tradition of social, cultural and social psychological research to which his ideas gave rise. Throughout, Lorenzer is viewed as seeking to put psychoanalysis on a materialist footing and concerned to assert its critical potential.2 Key-words: Lorenzer, depth-hermeneutic method, psychoanalysis, unconscious and society, social research.As the Introduction to this special issue has argued, Alfred Lorenzer's work is little known in the Anglophone world. With this in mind, in what follows we aim to introduce some of his major ideas -in particular, the scenic, interaction forms, engrams, symbolisation and desymoblisation, language games and scenic understanding.Collectively, these underpin Lorenzer's attempt, as he viewed it, to place psychoanalysis on a materialist footing and constitute his distinctive understanding of human being. As we will go on to demonstrate, this understanding is at once profoundly embodied, individual, relational and social. Indeed, it is possible to argue that, for Lorenzer, these dimensions exist only in and through each other. Although inherently in tension, they are, so Lorenzer argues, mutually constitutive -this is to say, they are made and remade in ongoing dialectical relations.In attempting to explain some of the core aspects of Lorenzer's thinking we have had to confront a number of problems. The first of these lies in the fact that his metapsychological reflections are dispersed over a wide body of work. Rather than an attempt a comprehensive survey of this literature, we have, instead, chosen to focus on those aspects of his output that our closest to our own concerns. As such, we have taken our lead from a relatively small number of texts, in particular 'Depth-hermeneutic cultural analysis' ['Tiefenhermeneutische Kulturanalyse'] which provides a condensed statement of some of Lorenzer's more significant ideas on the relationship between the 3 individual, the unconscious and the social and on how a psychoanalytically-informed method might inform non-clinical research (Lorenzer, 1986a). Clearly, given that his career spanned some forty plus years, this strategy cannot hope to do justice to the richness and range of Lorenzer's interests. Nevertheless, we would argue that it brings into view some of the major contours of his thought and introduces a range of concepts of direct concern to anyone interested in the psychoanalysis of culture and society.The second problem we faced relates to the rather forbidding nature of Lorenzer's prose. This not only renders translation pro...

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