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The term hermeneutics is used broadly to describe the [[process ]] of justifying [[interpretation ]] through exposing the criteria used to produce it. The [[form ]] is also used, by extension, to designate a twentieth-century [[philosophy ]] for which interpretation is either a condition for accessing [[meaning ]] through [[thought]], and therefore a condition of every [[science ]] of [[mind ]] as such, thus implicating the normativity of [[logic]], or the praxis of thought itself, no product of thought [[being ]] capable of escaping infinite reinterpretation since it would then no longer be [[living ]] thought but [[dead ]] thought.

In a limited [[sense]], Logic, as [[understood ]] by [[Aristotle]]'s Organon, has been and remains the framework of hermeneutics. "Hermeneia," [[Paul ]] [[Ricoeur ]] writes, "in the fullest sense, is the meaning of the [[sentence]]"—and goes on to criticize an "overly 'lengthy' [[concept]]" of interpretation. But this is also the [[case ]] when "hermeneutics" is understood as [[biblical ]] exegesis (an "overly restricted" sense). Here it is [[theology]], understood as an exclusive [[theory ]] and therefore as a preestablished [[doctrine]], that [[conditions ]] [[truth ]] and falsehood, and thus access to the determination of meaning. It should not be surprising therefore to find within the result of the interpretation what we were trying to find from the start.

Understood as philosophy, hermeneutics rejects the fact that [[logical ]] [[concepts]], in the [[Hegelian ]] sense, can [[present ]] and determine meaning, or that the "logic of the concept" can be its concretization; nor can the concept serve as a criterion of [[signification]]. However, hermeneutic finality can remain with the concept in the sense of [[discourse]], or, on the contrary, an interpretation that falls short of the [[separation ]] of [[words ]] and things, an interpretation of the [[constitution ]] of a possible [[world ]] by each and for all, or even a fundamental process of "leveling" the [[language ]] of the [[unconscious]].

[[Freud ]] considered that [[analytic ]] interpretation, at the [[clinical ]] [[situation]], transmutes the [[patient]]'s [[dreams ]] into the [[true ]] creative and critical [[power ]] of [[subjectivity]]. For this [[reason ]] interpretation is not and could not be an "extension" of the [[dream]], as [[Ludwig Wittgenstein ]] claimed, believing to have found in this a critique of the unscientific [[nature ]] of [[Freudian ]] "hermeneutics." Since, according to Wittgenstein, to [[interpret ]] a dream is to prolong it, Freud's method of [[dream interpretation ]] remains within the dream from the point of view of its [[scientific ]] [[value]]. Thus one can also say that hermeneutics risks arbitrariness or relevancy that is only superficial to the extent that it can drift into an [[imaginary ]] free [[association ]] of [[ideas ]] in connection of symbiotic or "esoteric" [[object]], whereas this [[free association ]] must itself be the object of a rigorous interpretation with reorganized and shared criteria; so hermeneutics also runs the risks of falling into a "delirium of interpretation," a [[psychotic ]] hermeneutics used by the [[schizophrenic]], who cultivates a discourse of paradoxes in [[order ]] to protect himself from [[ambivalence ]] and [[conflict ]] (Paul-Claude Racamier).

See also: Amplification (analytical [[psychology]]); Deferred [[action]]; Interpretation; Philosophy and [[psychoanalysis]].[[Bibliography]]