What is it about?
The present article discusses the concept of truth and its vicissitudes as it is reflected in psychoanalytic theory and practice. In order to place the analysis of truth in a psychological framework, truth is redefined in terms of human experience, psychic structure and dynamics. The notion of truth axes as organizational principles of the mind is introduced as the psychic extension of a fundamental conception of truth. Truth axes are then related to basic human needs, developmental challenges and alternating self-states. Truth axes convey both non-individual regularities resulting from general psychic needs and their particular expressions as determined by specific developmental histories. From this analysis emerges a post-postmodern construal of subjectivity as epistemic multiplicity. This construal articulates multi-perspectivism in terms of finite, definable non-contingent features of the psyche.
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Why is it important?
This article analyses the human quest for truth in terms of the underlying psychology, but it does this in a way that allows philosophical conceptions of truth to inform the related psychology. The resulting constructs are called truth axes, which the paper investigates with prime reference to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
Perspectives
This article is a bold attempt to bridge philosophy and psychoanalysis, and to show how they present themselves through the discussion of truth, one through the lens of the other.
Dr Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot
Bar Ilan University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: (Ef)facing truth: Between philosophy and psychoanalysis., Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, February 2017, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/teo0000055.
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