Page 12 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

Xiii Translator’s Introduction

tions under which systematic distortions in communication arise.
It is on this last point that Freud has most to offer; he provides
us with a general interpretation of early-childhood patterns of
interaction, coordinated with a phase-specific model of personal-
ity formation. This “‘general interpretation’”’ or “interpretative
schema”’ has the form of a “systematically generalized history’’ of
psychodynamic development. Its methodological peculiarities pro-
vide clues as to what is distinctive about critical theory. For one
thing, the application of such an interpretive schema has an in-
expungible hermeneutic component. Its concepts are schematic
or type concepts that have to be translated into individuated situ-
ations; it is applied in constructing histories in which subjects
can recognize themselves and their world. In contrast to ordinary
philological hermeneutics, however, this reconstruction of individ-
ual life histories requires a peculiar combination of interpretive
understanding and causal explanation. “We cannot ‘understand’
the ‘what’—the semantic content of the systematically distorted
expression—without at the same time ‘explaining’ the ‘why’—
the origin of the systematic distortion itself.” ° The explanatory
hypotheses refer not to the “causality of nature’ but, so to speak,
to the “causality of fate,’ that is, to the workings of repressed
motives and other “symbolic contents.”” The postulated causal
connections do not represent an invariance of natural laws but
an invariance of life history that operates through “the symbolic
means of the mind” and can thus be analytically dissolved.
Other methodological peculiarities of Freud’s general theory of
psychodynamic development concern the type of corroboration
appropriate to a systematically generalized history of this type.
The assumptions it contains—about interaction patterns between
the child and primary reference persons, about corresponding
conflicts and forms of coping with conflict, about the personality
structures that result, and so on—serve as a ‘‘narrative foil’ for
the reconstruction of individual life histories. They are developed
as the result of numerous and repeated clinical experiences and
are correspondingly subject to empirical corroboration. But this
corroboration is of a distinctive sort; the physician’s attempt to
combine the fragmentary information obtained in the analytic
dialogue and to offer a hypothetical reconstruction of the patient’s