Constructivism in the Age of Trump: Truth, Lies, and Knowing the Difference

Abstract

Donald Trump lies so often that some have wondered whether he has poisoned the well. Can we continue to defend the constructivism of relational psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on interpretive understanding? Might it not be claimed that this is actually the very approach Trump himself takes? Does an openness to interpretive understanding allow anybody to just say anything, as Trump does? Would our views perhaps be more justified and defensible, and give less shelter to the world’s liars, if we shifted to a reliance on objectivism and its advocacy of “facts?” I say no. I take the point of view, drawing illustrations from the news of the months just before this presentation was delivered (June 2018), that the crucial democratic influence of constructivism not only persists when despotic leaders lie in order to enforce their agendas, it is actually magnified under circumstances like those we face now.

Notes

¹ This is the most recent period for which Fact Checker had tallied their findings at the time this piece was written.

² A partial list of these writers, an otherwise disparate crew, includes Barthes, Richard Bernstein, Jerome Bruner, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Paul Goodman, Habermas, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nagel, Ulric Neisser, Ricoeur, Rorty, Charles Taylor, and Paul Watzlawick.

³ In objectivist views, the mind’s knowledge of itself, or of the self, is a special case; but this special case doesn’t contradict the rule: In objectivist views, that is, what we can know about our minds, like what we can know about the outside world, preexists our acquaintance with it.

⁴ Here let me just add that I accept the existence of interpretations that are so widespread that they may as well be facts. That the object in front of me is a table is an interpretation; but it is such an obvious one that the interpretive aspect is trivial.

⁵ See also Schmidt (1995).

⁶ Just a month before these remarks were delivered.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donnel B. Stern

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D., is Faculty, Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute; Clinical Consultant and Faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; and Faculty, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. His most recent book (2018) is The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language and the Nonverbal.