Psychic Truth and the In-Session Work of the Analyst

Abstract

I seek to address one of the issues most affected by the postmodern culture, such as the crisis of rationality and truth, and try to reformulate its place within the psychoanalytic clinic using the contributions of Freud and Ferenczi, who drew the matrix of a passionate dialogue about the truth and the analyst work that has nurtured many contemporary theoretical developments. Essentially, the major influences of postmodern thought in psychoanalysis are to emphasize the importance of the patient–analyst interaction, the role played by the analyst in the patient’s transference and the rejection of the model of the analyst as a distant observer who interprets without having anything to do with whatever happens within the mind of the patient. Consequently, because both postmodernism and psychoanalysis are concerned with human subjectivity and love for truth, although indeed understanding them from different perspectives, both schools of thought become easily interrelated. I conclude that psychoanalysis, committed as it is with the search for truth, cannot ignore the influence of postmodern thought, as well as the postmodernist movement should not disregard all theoretical consistency provided by psychoanalytic theory and metapsychology.

Notes

¹ The question of whether the memories of childhood events obeyed to fantasies or to actual facts haunted Freud and had him fraught with uncertainty. Thus, for example, in the Lecture no. 18 of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud, 1916–1917) he pointed out that “there is no need to abandon the traumatic line of approach as being erroneous” and in From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (Freud, 1918) he stated that “the old trauma theory of the neurosis … had suddenly come to the front once more.” If indeed in An Autobiographical Study (Freud, 1925), discussing his 1896 work The Aetiology of Hysteria, he was asserting that “as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality,” in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) he was lamenting not having a single analysis of traumatic neurosis, and in Moses and Monotheism (1939) he would reappraise again the importance of trauma.

² “If, with the aid of knowledge we have obtained from the dissection of many minds, but above all from the dissection of our own, we have succeeded in forming a picture of possible or probable associations of the patient’s of which he is still completely unaware, we […] are able to conjecture, not only his withheld thoughts, but trends of his of which he is unconscious” (Ferenczi, 1928, p. 61, emphasis added).

³ See Ferenczi (1927): “a neurotic cannot be regarded as cured if he has not given up pleasure in unconscious fantasy, i.e., unconscious mendacity.”

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Notes on contributors

Luis J. Martín Cabré

Luis J. Martín Cabré is Full Member and Training Analyst of the Psychoanalytic Association of Madrid (Asociación Psicoanalítica de Madrid; APM), and a Member of the Spanish Society of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents. He is also a founding member of the International “Sándor Ferenczi” Foundation.