Vienna seems to be a good place to remind ourselves about the manifold and rich possibilities psychoanalytic thinking is able to provide for the purposes of biographical research, especially for those forms which deal with the biographical constellation of educational thinking. The main reason for this is that psychoanalytic data tend to condensate on the backside of experiences deriving more or less directly from education itself. Using psychoanalytic theorems therefore enables us to confirm the assumption that educational theories seem to have a special “latent text” which underlies the “explicit text” of a given theory and thereby allows to clarify what Reichenbach once had called “the context of discovery”. Due to the fact that educational theories tend to be rather weak as far as their “context of justification” is concerned the biographical perspective can be helpful to show the oscillating interplay between biography on the one hand and theory on the other hand. Nevertheless: in a methodological perspective we have to take in mind that a clinical situation is very different in comparison with a hermeneutic one. To give only one example: a “clinical truth” emerges from a face-to-face-interaction, dialogically so to speak; in contrast a “hermeneutic truth” derives from the interaction between a given (autobiographical) text and the one who reads and tries to understand it, hence more or less from a silent internal monologue. What does this mean for the validity of interpretations? And what makes the difference between “good” and “bad” interpretations. Are their special methodological rules to increase the interpretative validity? In answering to those questions it will become clear that psychoanalytic interpretations first of all have to be regarded as “interpretations”. Thinking for example on Ricoeur’s contributions we finally could take the conclusion that the interpretation of a text does not produce “truth”, but at least “grades of probability”. Psychoanalytic interpretations therefore are far away from being “true”, but nevertheless they can be more or less “probable”. And sometimes they can be even more probable than others. The perspective of my presentation it far away from national borders which for example could clearly be demonstrated by looking on a French author, Rousseau, and compare his type of theorizing educationally with a German speaking Swiss one, Pestalozzi. To put it differently: the relation between educational theory and educator’s biography undoubtedly is an international phenomenon.

The main research instrument is "hermeneutical text analysis", enriched by theoretical assumptions deriving from modern psychoanalytic self psychology (kohutian wing) applied mainly to autobiogaphical data from the history of education.

In contrast to the widespread beliefs in "evidences" the presenter wants to show the utility and the possibilities of the "interpretative paradigm" for the purposes of a modern selfreflexive educational biographical research.Interpretations con never be "evidence-based"; nevertheless they can be more or less "probable".