Useful Untruths: A Plea for the Necessity of Pluralism in Child Analysis

ABSTRACT

The late nineteenth century philosopher Hans Vaihinger and the preeminent contemporary philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah contend that in order to see a more complete picture of the world, we need a plurality of pictures with which to view it, not just one. This truth comes with epistemological burdens and with the inconvenient fact that the human mind is unable to juggle more than one picture or theory simultaneously. Thus, psychoanalytic clinicians tend to select one theory as a guide when treating patients.

In this paper, I will offer ways to think about this conundrum as it appears in the child psychoanalytic setting and whether it is possible to shift from one’s usual theoretical point of view to include alternate theoretical perspectives – and thus, to gain a more complete “truth”, as Vaihinger and Appiah suggest we should aspire to – as the clinical situation allows.

KEYWORDS:

• Philosophy
• child analysis
• pluralism
• obstacles to the transference
• countertransference triggers
• useful untruths

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This lecture is a version, tailored for child analysts, of a paper the author previously published: Lament, C. “Useful untruths: another look at pluralism in the clinical setting” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXXIX: (2) 195–218.

2. Some of what is printed here with respect to this topic overlaps with my paper, “When a patient is unable to work in the transference”: Dr. Lament’s response” (2020b).

3. This is a disguised portrait of a patient.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Claudia Lament

Claudia Lament, Ph.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst at The Psychoanalytic Association of New York, an affiliate of The New York University Langone School of Medicine; the Editor-in-Chief of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child; and President of The Anna Freud Foundation.