Clinical truth and contemporary relativism: meaning and narration in the psychoanalytic situation.
This paper proposes that clinical psychoanalysis requires distinctions for its practice that tend to be blurred by a less than careful importation of contemporary philosophical concepts. One such distinction is that between narration and the event narrated; another, that between meaning seen as absolutely relative and meaning understood as hierarchical. The first distinction identifies present experience as formed by a narrative strategy arrived at in the past. The second distinction allows pathology to be described as arrests or limitations in the ability to construe meaning. This perspective has implications for a number of current debates, among them those concerning the roles of interpretation and reconstruction. A clinical illustration involving the reconstruction of a disavowed perception and relying on the aforementioned distinctions is presented.
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D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010553:Personality Development; D010684:Philosophy; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D014167:Transference, Psychology; D014342:Truth Disclosure; D014705:Verbal Behavior