This chapter is concerned with the attempts of philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists to determine the correct relation of Freud’s ideas to hermeneutics. My primary aim is to make clear, on the one hand, the reasons for supposing that psychoanalysis is fundamentally consonant with, and has the capacity to enrich, the broad hermeneutical standpoint, and on the other, the difficulties which this project encounters. The second section presents accordingly two classic statements, in Sartre and Wittgenstein, of the irreconcilability of Freud with hermeneutical assumptions. In the third section I sketch the major, large-scale attempts of Habermas and Ricœur to integrate Freudian thinking with hermeneutics, and give some indication of their respective strengths and weaknesses. In the final section I address directly the question of how in the most general terms Freud conceives meaning, and argue, with reference to two major texts of Freud’s, in which we find him in dialogue with Brentano, that his ultimate commitments are to a type of realism regarding the mental which is at variance with the hermeneutical standpoint, as it has come to be understood.