The quest for the real (2016)

Abstract

In 2015, I was invited by Gabriela Legorreta to contribute a chapter for a book she was editing, with Lawrence J. Brown, to be called On Freud’s ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ . I immediately accepted, since I felt that this was an excellent opportunity to reflect on a couple of subjects that had occupied my thought for a long time: Freud’s abandonment of his traumatic theory of neurosis and the concept of truth in psychoanalysis. Freud’s abrupt theoretical turn, in 1897, has been considered, in the official history of psychoanalysis, to be its true beginning, since it provided a new focus on the intrapsychic that replaced the previous environmental theory. There is no doubt that this new perspective paved the path for a most fruitful enquiry of the inner dimension of human experience, but it also left out, and even forbade, any enquiry of the interpersonal and the transpersonal. Indeed, the unswerving belief in the absolute primacy of the intrapsychic became a shibboleth to distinguish between ‘true psychoanalysis’ and ‘what is not psychoanalysis’. Consequently, most schisms in the psychoanalytic movement have derived from the attempts to reintroduce the enquiry of interpersonal and transpersonal processes into the psychoanalytic field. However, since many of the more recent developments in the analytic theory and practice have been in that direction, we believe it is high time to re-evaluate that theoretical turn. This is, of course, related to the problem of truth. The search for truth, understood as reliable knowledge, has been held as the aim of several disciplines, such as science, philosophy, religion, and art, but each of them has its own definition of it. Freud (1933a) believed the scientific conception of truth to be the only one worthy of that name, but this is far from obvious. Hence, we strongly feel that the very concept of truth needs to be enquired. I had done so in a previous writing (Tubert-Oklander, 2008b), in which I proposed the concept of a psychoanalytic truth, and I came back to it in the present chapter (Tubert-Oklander, 2016).