Matters of Perspective: Reply to David Brand's “the Real, the Constructed, and the Personal”

Abstract

The author argues that if Freud's epistemology were somehow seen as relativism rather than its actual objectivism, the theory would lose its coherence. That is similar to what occurred with David Brand's discussion of the author's paper entitled “Toward Conceptualizing the Personal Relationship in Psychoanalysis,” in which Brand proceeded under the assumption that the author's perspectivist epistemology was a constructivist/relativist one. What followed, nevertheless, was a lively, instructive exchange in which the implications and limitations of several epistemological dimensions of psychoanalytic work were elaborated and explored.