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  • Introduction
  • Rachel B. Blass

In essence, psychoanalysis may be regarded as a theory of truth and of the power of truth to cure. "Turn your eyes inwards," Freud entreats an arrogant ego in an imaginary dialogue, "look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself! Then you will understand why you were bound to fall ill; and perhaps you will avoid falling ill in the future" (1917, 143). According to Freud and generations of his followers, it is the unconscious truth of the mind—psychic reality—that the ego refuses to know, and that in turn makes us ill. In fact, in many ways illness is, according to Freud, the failure to know oneself, self-knowledge being a lived state of integration of unconscious truth—of fantasies, wishes, drives, and feelings often of a conflicted and contradictory nature. Thus, it is not merely a state of impaired mental health that psychoanalysis comes to cure, but one of impaired human existence; and the remedy, truth, is of ethical significance. As Freud wrote in 1914 to the neurologist and moral thinker J. J. Putnam, "the great ethical element in [psychoanalytic] work is truth and again truth" (qtd. in Hale 1971, 171).

But like all strong medicine, truth may be experienced as a dangerous thing. We wish to avoid it through ignorance and doubt, but also through a false certainty that bars an encounter with truths unknown or undesirable by imposing our preconceived ideas on reality. More than any other theory, psychoanalysis has drawn our attention to the psychic obstacles to knowing truth, and how they affect all efforts to understand. These efforts include those of the analyst as well as the patient, those directed towards personal knowledge as well as general theoretical knowledge; and psychoanalytic theory has not exempted itself in this regard.

In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, Freud's own writings about truth exemplify his struggle with the desire for truth, including the doubting, denial, and feelings of certainty that inevitably accompany the search for so elusive yet prized a goal [End Page 253] (see Blass and Simon 1994; Blass 2003). For instance, his doubts regarding the veracity of his seduction theory, which marked the beginning of psychoanalysis, were not merely the result of a discovery that oedipal fantasies could be at the source of his patients' incestuous reports, but were intensified by the fact that this discovery emerged through Freud's recognition that his own theories were having a seductive influence on these very reports. As Freud explained in one of his retrospective accounts of that early period:

When, however, I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them, I was for some time completely at a loss.

(1925, 34)

Thus, the first analytic lesson was as much about the influence of the actual act of seduction as it was about doubt and the danger of false certainty; about how the love of truth can be perverted into a traumatic imposition that distorts reality. And indeed, psychoanalysis has regarded truth not only as a curative factor and ethical force, but also as an object of desire. Freud's notion of an instinctual longing for knowledge (Wissbegierde), later extended in Klein's thinking on the epistemophilic instinct and in Bion's formulation of K, speak to the postulation by psychoanalysis that a passionate search for truth is basic to the human psyche.

Postmodern thinking stands fundamentally opposed to this psychoanalytic perspective, offering a range of versions as to why there is no truth to be attained and why the hope of doing so is illusory at best. From this standpoint, what we hold to be true are no more than human constructions, formed through the influence of subjective and contextual factors and always culturally relative, rather than anything objective, as the "positivistic" scientific worldview would have us believe. Such postmodern teachings fell on many eager ears within the psychoanalytic world, primarily in North America in the 1970s and '80s. The ardent desire for truth in psychoanalysis never eventuated in systematic...

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