 Ricoeur explains that the itinerary of the hermeneutical long route to self-understanding passes through an analysis of a broad range of symbolic forms, such as the “cosmic” symbolism revealed by the phenomenology of religion, the symbolic character of “desire” revealed by psychoanalysis, and the symbolic forms revealed by the study of literature and the arts (Ricoeur, “Existence and Hermeneutics,” 13). In his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Ricoeur describes Freud, along with Nietzsche and Marx, as a master of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’ In this, interpretation, as a ‘deciphering of hidden meaning in the apparent meaning,’ takes on a critical function through the exposure of repressed or distorted meaning that lies beneath the surface of commonly accepted meaning.