Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90:331345

doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2009.00136.x

Education Section Is truth an illusion? Psychoanalysis and postmodernism1

David Bell
Flat 4, Mullion Court, 112 Finchley Road, London NW3 5JH davidlbell@ hotmail.com; dbell@tavi-port.nhs.uk The sort of reflection that I have been engaging in is just the sort of reflection that both Comte and Rorty see as pointless. For Comte, such reflection is a throwback to a pre-scientific age; for Rorty, a reluctance to enter fully into the postmodern one. Some of you will probably agree with one or other of these thinkers. But in my view reflection on just what it is that makes thinkers like Rorty doubt the very idea of representing the world, and I think there is a Rorty as well as a Comte in each of us, however suppressed, is part of understanding ourselves, and not just part of understanding certain sophisticated and influential thinkers. For what is common to Rorty and Comte is the idea that much of what we think we know cannot have the status it seems to have. For Richard Rorty the recommended response is to take a more playful attitude to what we think we know; and for August Comte it is to sternly restrict ourselves to positive knowledge. But understanding the temptations and seductions of the idea that Comte and Rorty share, so that we can live with those temptations and seductions without succumbing to them, is far more important, and more valid as a response, than pretending that the world is either just a playpen or just a scientific laboratory. (Hilary Putnam, 1995, pp. 30910)

*** The philosopher Susan Haack tells the following story:

Not long ago I heard my Dean, a physicist by training, express his unease at the suggestion that the Mission Statement for the College of Arts and Science included the phrase concern for truth. The word makes people nervous, he warned, and they are bound to ask whose truth . A sociologist colleague seconding the Deans reservations remarked that, while of course his research advances knowledge, he isnt concerned with truth. A couple of us pointed out that unless your conclusions are true, they arent really knowledge, only purported knowledge and I did my best to explain that it doesnt follow from the fact that people disagree about what is true that truth is relative to perspective. (Haack, 1999, p. 12)

Such conversations represent an important sea change in attitude. The recognition of the fragility of truth-claims, of how easily they are overloaded
1

A shortened version of this paper was presented to the 46th IPA conference, Berlin 2008.

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with individual, social and political preconceptions, resulting in important challenges to orthodoxy, are all essential to the pursuit of knowledge. But this process had undergone an important transformation and a peculiar new orthodoxy had gained hegemony. In a way that has truly advanced our knowledge, the link between what is held to be knowledge (that is, purported truth) on the one hand, and powerful interests on the other, has been increasingly subjected to deep and illuminating scrutiny. This exposed the importance of ideology and power in what is claimed as knowledge. Social theorists have shown that what is held to be true often turns out to be a substitute for truth, a substitute that serves certain vested interests. Here the principal figure would be Marx. Similarly Freud showed how, at an individual level, human beings have a powerful tendency to substitute for truth wishful illusions that, one might say, serve certain internal, vested interests. This explanatory structure is still underpinned by a conception of truth. Uncovering ideology and self-deception brings a world that is broader, truer than the one that preceded this understanding. And this is in line with psychoanalytic explanation which endeavours, amongst other things, to show that individuals and groups have vested interests in perceiving or, more properly, misperceiving the world. But the relativization of all truth is something entirely different. Postmodernism2 dispenses with any conception of truth, claiming that no distinction can be drawn between what is claimed as truth and preference or fashion. Where there is no conception of truth, its various counterparts, namely deceptions, lies, and misrepresentations also lose their foothold. What a depth psychology or depth social explanation might look like without such concepts is very hard to understand. The relativization of truth brings not a recognition that there are no ultimate truths, but a world in which the very terms truth or reality should themselves be abandoned as they have no meaning, only serving, so it is claimed, as a legitimation of power by those who claim to know. There is here a slippage from the understanding that certain claims as to what is true might, and often do, turn out to be false, to the claim therefore there is no such thing as truth, only purported truth, different perspectives, each of which has their value. What has been accepted as known fact turned out to be no such thing; therefore there are no facts. What is at issue here is a confusion between what is true and what is held to be true. Truths about the world, which may be very hard to come by, do not depend on perspective. But what we suppose to be true, what Susan Haack calls purported truth, do and may turn out to be false. What I hold to be true may be incompatible with what you hold to be true, but from this it does not follow that incompatible truths can both be true. When we talk of your truth and my truth we speak loosely, as truth is not something
2

The term postmodernism has a very wide range including literature, architecture, music, art, etc. This paper, however, addresses not these aesthetic forms (of which the author is an admirer), but instead an epistemological position, associated with postmodernism, that expresses an extreme form of relativism. 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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that can be possessed by any individual but is something we apprehend. (As Bion [1970]3 has pointed out, truth is not a possession but something that we apprehend alongside others. It is only the lie, as it is a personal construction, that can be possessed, and this accounts in part for its attraction.) The relativizers of truth seem at one and the same time to be saying that there can be no epistemic standards as to what is to count as knowledge, claiming, for example, that the shaman and the physician are both true in their own ways, or understood within there own social context, that we cannot judge between them, whilst also claiming that their non-white, non-western, non-masculinist non-scientific standards are better (Haack, 1999, p. 13). In a similar way the clearly correct assertion that any view is a view from somewhere, there being no perspective-free position, slips into the assertion that all perspectives are equal, that one view cannot be more objective than another. No perspective should be privileged4 over any other. Instead, what is offered is a great democracy of truth. Here there can be no place for differentiating between the world as it is and the world as we know it. All such discussions collapse into discourses about discourses, and not discourses about the world. No perspective can clash with any other, as each is right from its own point of view. Similarly no perspective can clash with reality, as reality is a fiction. Thus one of the fundamental bases of human conflict, between wish-fulfilling views of the world mistaken for reality, and reality as it really is, is removed at a stroke. The apparent egalitarianism of this position and its opposition to absolutes is rather offset by the universalism and absolutism of its own position, a tyrannical assertion that there are no truths and that all views are equal. It believes itself to be possessed of a higher order truth (the truth that there is no truth). There is a certain righteous tone or, as Susan Haack has put it, a higher dismissiveness. I will have reason to return to this later in the paper. A further difficulty of such perspectivalism can perhaps be seen from the following. I might have started this paper by saying that I am male, white and middle-class the implication here being that the claims I am about to make should be understood only within that socio-cultural framework context; that I am not necessarily making any claims that would be relevant, for example, to a black working-class woman. The difficulty here is, I think, immediately apparent. It lies in the issue of where to stop. I could perhaps sharpen up my position further by adding that I am 58, a doctor, a psychoanalyst, live in North London. But, maybe I should add that I live in Crouch End in that Crouch Enders may have a different perspective on truth than those in Hampstead or Brixton, and so I could go on as there is no obvious place to stop, until in the end I give such a complete picture of the perspective within which my assertions must be judged that the only person to whom they can be directed is myself. Extreme relativism thus reveals itself as a kind of solipsism. The point here is that the place at which this stops, say at being white and middle-class, would rest on the unquestioned
3 4

See especially pp. 1013.

It is worth noting here the moral tone. Claiming that one view might be broader, more accurate than another is understood as giving it a special privilege. 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90

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assumption that, say, my being a psychoanalyst is less relevant to the matter under discussion than my being white and middle-class. Such an assumption could not be justified without appealing to a logic that has already been outlawed from this relativistic perspective. It is also worth remarking here that the person who insists that he is only talking from his own point of view surrenders the possibility of being wrong. Making the stronger claim that one believes a statement to be true has an important modesty because implicit is the possibility that one may turn out to be wrong.

Psychoanalysis and postmodernism

The postmodernist relativization of all truth marks a final break with the modernist project. Its influence has been wide especially within the humanities and it has been considered by some as a natural philosophical home for psychoanalysis. A number of authors have suggested that bringing psychoanalysis within the postmodern liberates it from what is characterized (caricatured) as its making omnipotent claims for objectivity and Truth, its nave scientism. This view of psychoanalysis is, I think, a gross misrepresentation. Further, the celebration of multiplicity, pluralism and the abandonment of a conception of truthfulness opposes some features of psychoanalysis that are, I believe, central to its world-view. Modernism is used, I think, in two distinct ways. Firstly, and very germane to my theme, one might take modernism to refer, broadly, to the movement from the 17th century onwards that is characterized by the view that human knowledge derives from reason and that understanding of the world must be based on accurate observation of it; in other words, the project of the Enlightenment. Here modernism is counter-posed to religious and mystical notions which view knowledge and understanding as given by God (truth as revealed, as opposed to Truth as worked out, struggled for). An underlying credo of the modernist movement is that it is through knowledge that human beings can emancipate themselves. Another conception of modernism, sometimes called High Modernism, refers to those momentous upheavals which, though starting long before, have as their main context the turn of the last century. This was the time of a major break with classic modes of thought, be they in music (with the breaking with classical form), in art (the break with realism and the birth of cubism) or in literature, with the psychological novel, namely the novel that locates its principle scene of action in the interiority of individuals. In this sense psychoanalysis is a child of high modernism. But psychoanalysis occupies a paradoxical position in relation to the Enlightenment project. It constitutes the last of a number of critical decentrings of Mans view of his place in the world.5 But Freuds discovery of the importance and influence of the irrational in the psychological life dealt perhaps the most devastating blow of all to mans narcissism. Even in his
5

Freud rightly saw himself as following the other Great De-centrers. First was Copernicus who removed the earth, and so man, from being placed at the centre of the universe. Next came Darwin who removed man from his central place in nature. 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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own mind he is moved by forces beyond his control. Yet Freud, of course, did not hold up his hands and surrender to the dominion of the irrational, but observed that behind the apparently nonsensical there lay deeper truths. In this sense, he reclaimed the irrational for the house of reason, giving an account of its history, its nature and the laws that govern its functioning, whilst always maintaining that the knowledge arrived at, important though it is, is extremely limited. High Modernism, the soil from which psychoanalysis sprung, was not a break with certain core features of modernism, such as the belief that knowledge brings freedom, but brought about a revolution in our understanding of the limitations that we labour under to acquire such knowledge and also put the seal on the possibility of any knowledge being absolute. The critical thinkers of this period, Freud and Marx, sought to expose the illusions we create and live by, illusions which conceal from us necessary truths of our condition. Postmodernism as an epistemology, then, is not a child of High Modernism, which broke with old forms that constrained knowledge to discover deeper truths, but instead stands in opposition to all claims of knowledge, truth or reality. The postmodernist argument refers to all truth-claims whether they refer to the natural or the human sciences. Some may find this a difficult position to sustain in relation to the Natural Sciences, but might find the argument more persuasive when it comes to human experience itself. That psychoanalysis has as its primary concern inner experience, which is complex and many-sided, may make it appear to belong within such a postmodernist framework. This is, I think, profoundly mistaken. Firstly, there is no necessary connection between complexity and relativization of truth. Secondly, psychoanalytic explanation, whilst asserting the enormity of the factor of subjectivity in determining any human beings understanding of his world, at the same time maintains a commitment to objectivity. In fact this tension between the importance of subjectivity and the struggling for objectivity is an essential tension of our subject. One might add that it is also constitutive of what it is to be human. It is important to disentangle a commitment to recognizing the importance of the subjective, a deep involvement with it, from the doctrine of Subjectivism, which claims that subjectivity is all there is in the world (in other words, Idealism). In fact, recognizing the importance of subjectivity is part of an attempt to be more objective, whilst labouring under difficult conditions. There is, thus, no necessary connection between deep involvement with human subjectivity and subjectivism as a philosophical position.6

Some characteristics of psychoanalytic thought

There are a number of core features which are both constitutive of psychoanalytic explanation and which locate it firmly within modernism and
6 This and many other related epistemological and cultural points (too many to mention) touched on in this paper, are discussed at length by Terry Eagleton (1996) in his brilliant The Illusions of Postmodernism.

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which are inimical to postmodernism. Psychoanalysis is a critical activity both at the level of theory and practice. Appearance, that which is manifest, when probed reveals deeper realities. And this is the way that knowledge advances, whether it be at the level of the individual patient or at the level of theory. These deeper realities reveal structures, which, if they are to be credited with real explanatory value, have to do work. They have to explain the phenomena addressed and at the same time have to explain why these deeper causal structures are not self-evident. This is true, in general, of scientific explanation. The laws of planetary motion show that the earth is not an unmoving body in the centre of a universe that rotates around it. Further, they also show why it appears as if this is the case. Physics shows us that in solid matter there is more space than solid, but, again, can also account for the fact that this does not appear to be the case. Similarly, Freuds understanding of symptoms characterizes the symptom as only the outward appearance of a deeper structure, a compromise between hidden forces within the mind. It both expresses and obscures conflict. At one and the same time the theory gives an account of the phenomenon and, through the concepts of repression and resistance, of why it is that we are pulled towards settling for appearance.7 Such forms of explanation are committed to the view that seeing beyond mere appearances is a potentially emancipatory activity. A distinct but related feature of psychoanalytic explanation is its commitment to historical continuity. Where discontinuities occur apparently, part of the task will be to show continuities functioning but at a less apparent level. A firm distinction between personality and illness cannot hold from a psychoanalytic perspective, as what appears as illness is also understood as continuous with personality, a personality development brought about under the stress of certain internal and external conditions. Thus a breakdown manifests itself as a most impressive discontinuity, apparently, but, when examined more deeply and in more detail, shows in bizarre and distorted form conflicts and preoccupations that were part of the personality prior to the breakdown. In fact the capacity to help the patient integrate his pre- and post-breakdown state is an important part of the work, as is the less welcome discovery that recovery is not recovery from the difficulties that brought about the illness. These continue, though at a less manifest level, within the character structure of the individual patient. This commitment to the restoration of continuity to that which appeared to be discontinuous reflects the developmental perspective, which is central to psychoanalytic explanation.8
7

This mode of explanation is also characteristic of depth sociology where manifest social phenomena are viewed as the outward expression of deeper structural forces.

The finding of continuity in the apparently discontinuous extends beyond the individual patient to broader concerns. Freud showed the normal in the abnormal: even the most bizarre symptoms had as their content concerns which are universal to humanity. Postmodernism, of course, eschews all such universalist claims. 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis

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Given that the continuities I refer to are not manifest, it becomes clear that restoration of continuity is really a further aspect of the appearance reality distinction, discussed above. This type of understanding not only imparts meaning to symptoms, but goes further. A man may develop the symptoms that were originally manifest in his recently dead father and this may express his identification with his dead father, that is, a way of keeping him alive, as well as expressing his guilt (making himself suffer) arising from the realization of his own death wishes towards the father. The understanding of the meaning of the symptom displays at one and the same time its causal structure and its causal history.9 Wittgenstein viewed certain types of philosophical error as akin to a disease of understanding and his philosophical approach as a kind of therapy.10 The cause of the disease was not the doctrine per se but the attitude to the world that it revealed. All of us suffer from various kinds of epistemological malaise when it comes to facing certain unwanted aspects of reality. What we have learnt, however, is that such problems cannot be dealt with without a deep appreciation of the powerful emotional factors that bind us to a worldview which, though not manifest, deeply influences our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

First case
Mr As thinking was dominated by a relativistic perspective, although he was not fully aware of this. For him, the reality of his objects could be altered purely by changing the way he thought about them. He was in this sense a Subjectivist. He thought this view was quite consistent with the aims of psychoanalysis. He would avidly agree with any interpretation that he could take as implying that he was projecting aspects of himself into external objects. His understanding of analysis might be put in the following way: Through analysis I can learn how I distort my objects by projecting into them aspects of myself, which analysis will make me own. Then I will become able to see my objects as good, instead of bad. In his sessions there was a sort of energetic exposure of himself, this taking place in an atmosphere highly charged with moralism. When this procedure was no longer available to him, he collapsed into the most terrible despair, trapped with objects whose badness was now an unalterable fact. My patient, who suffered from a kind of solipsism, suffered from the related disorders of perspectivalism and multi-facetedness. For him there are no determining characteristics of an object, only views and facets. He might decide that his objects have certain unpleasant characteristics but then, in apparently excessively fair-minded way, would treat this
9 The reduction of psychoanalytic explanation of symptoms to meaning, and only meaning, in other words the hermeneutic turn, provides no place for this developmental perspective. 10 The philosopher is the man who has to cure himself of many sicknesses of the understanding (Wittgenstein, 1978).

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as only an aspect. For example, having decided that his analyst was using him perversely he also claimed that this was something that could be put aside, as he might gain something from the analysis, this viewed as completely abstracted from the human relationship within which it takes place.

Second case
Mr B led a very limited and utterly joyless life. He had relationships with women who had other partners and his activities with these women consisted mainly in going to the cinema. It did not seem to matter to him that these women had lovers, as he considered sexual intercourse as another activity added on, no different from going to the cinema. One might say he knew of the primal scene, but that knowledge had no significance for him. His view was limited in this way for various profound and disturbing reasons. When he did come to apprehend the significance of the primal scene, it brought awareness of exclusion and the attendant unbearable pain, but also ushered in a capacity to have a broader view of himself and thus also of the world around him.

Discussion
The point that I am making here, via these two vignettes, is that, as a result of the psychic moves made possible through development, we all become able to have a more objective and more complex view of ourselves and of the world. The new perspective contains within it the old, but is more inclusive, it transcends it. It does not exist alongside it as an alternative. We can conceive of someone having a truer relation to the world, or at least one that is less untrue, without having to think that this new expanded relation to the world provides truth in any ultimate sense. I can examine the world from one particular point of view in which I am heavily invested, say an envious perspective, and then realize that my perspective has been very limited, as it did not take into consideration certain features of the world that, I now realize, I had not wanted to think about. Now that I think of them I widen my frame of reference and so, relatively speaking, I am in a more objective position than I was before. This sort of move underlies the capacity to learn from experience. This learning, however, depends upon the capacity to negotiate what Money-Kyrle (1971) described as certain facts of life. Central to his model is the act of recognition of certain truths of the world, such as the awareness of the object, which is both good and beyond our control, and the awareness of our own mortality. Full recognition is an emotional experience. At one and the same time, it marks development and is a precondition for it. All of us have a tendency to put a kind of spin on these facts; we accept them and do not accept them. The patients described above in different ways tried to accommodate certain difficult facts without being affected by them. Mr B knew of the primal scene as a fact but gave it no significance. Mr A could not bear the awareness of bad objects which could not be altered and tried to change their nature through thinking of them differently.
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Both patients attempt to make un-negotiable facts into negotiable ones, and so render them inconsequential. But the privileging of subjectivity, characteristic of postmodernism, raises a thorny problem for this kind of understanding. The problems of Mr A and Mr B serve to show how a persons understanding of his world may derive from false consciousness.11 But in a world that provides no place for a conception of truthfulness there is no place for selfdeception, illusion, lies and other forms of false consciousness, for these derive their meaning from the contrast with truth reality. Postmodernism provides no place for false consciousness, as such a category can only make sense in a world in which something may be true, or at least more true. The privileging of subjectivity, giving experience itself a special status which cannot be gainsaid, does not allow the possibility that experiences may derive from poor understanding.

The attractions of relativism

When I tried to think about the excitement generated by postmodernism it struck me that what made it so attractive was the very fact that it claimed to transcend just those features of life which Freud emphasized as central to the human condition. Perhaps the most important of these concerns the acceptance of the inevitability of limitation. Postmodernism celebrates transitoriness, fluidity and plurality. It sounds the death knell of grand theory. As Terry Eagleton has put it: Science and philosophy must jettison their truth claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives (1987, p. 9). Appearance is, so to speak, all there is. In such a world the idea of depth (in the sense outlined above in terms of explanatory structure) is only a convenient myth for manipulating texts. The epistemological position of postmodernism is necessarily relativist, its ethic pragmatism. Truth collapses into what works. The epistemological problem addressed by postmodernism is not new, it is as old a philosophy itself. (Aristotle, for example, tells us: That which exists does not conform to various opinions, but rather the correct opinions conform to that which exists [quoted in Norris, 1995] and Platos Thaetetetus contains a prolonged discussion of the question of whether Man is the measure of all things.) What is new is the penetration of this form of thinking into society and culture as a whole defining in Raymond Williamss memorable phrase a new structure of feeling that informs the age. Hassan, Eagleton and others have pointed out that the world as depicted is profoundly schizoid, by which they mean fragmented and alienated (quoted in Harvey, 1990). This form of existence does not bring the emptiness and despair which one might imagine as its counterpart but instead becomes a basis for
A slave may say he is happy, that his master is good to him, and allows him one whole day off in thirty days and treats him in a kind fatherly way. His happiness, which is a fact of his life, is his subjective condition but in itself tells us nothing of whether or not he is oppressed. This might be based on a judgement of factors such as how much real freedom and control he has of his conditions. His belief in his freedom may be an illusion, false consciousness. 2009 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2009) 90
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celebration. David Harvey writes: Postmodernism swims, even wallows in the fragmentary currents of change, as if that is all there is (1990, p. 44). Michael Rustin captures both the epistemological and its personal implications of postmodernism, when he says: Reason floats free, in this world, without necessary limit or obstruction. What is post-modern about this theoretical scheme is its assumption that only historical anachronisms stand in the way of full human autonomy and self determination (Rustin, 1999, p. 112). Postmodernism minimizes the obstacles to self-understanding and the inevitable constraints on self-realization, positing pure relationships of selfrealization established for (their) own sake, beyond the constraints of family and ascribed social roles (Rustin, 1999 p. 116). The constraints that arise as a result of being human are, in the postmodern world, transcended. What is offered, an apparently limitless world without objective constraints, clearly a very attractive proposition, has important consequences for the understanding of identity. In a world where identities can be chosen to suit ones preference, identity ceases to exist as an enduring characteristic. But what manifests itself as freedom is, I think, really an enslavement to narcissism.12 Where choice does not impose limitations to further action, where ideologies, partners, commitments are all easily cancellable, then this is not really choice at all. Choice can only be choice in any strong existential sense of the word, can only have real meaning when it brings recognition of the breaking with other possibilities, with the inevitable feelings of loss that this brings. Freuds tragic vision of man engaged with the inevitable disappointments and pains of life, having to discard his illusions to become himself, is superseded in postmodernism by the illusion of infinite freedom, life as a shopping expedition. My reference to the shopping mall here is not accidental. Frederic Jameson (1991) has suggested that postmodernism is nothing more than the cultural logic of late capitalism. As in everaccelerating ways all human activities are brought under the hegemonic domination of the market, ideals, relationships, even philosophical positions can be chosen in the same way that one may choose any commodity. Ideas and beliefs can be bought into to be used as we need them, and to be disposed of when they are past their sell-by date. In this sense, postmodernism is the penetration of the commodity-form into epistemology. The painful difficult struggle for limited understanding is replaced by the pick and mix of the shopping malls.13 This world of limitlessness bears all the hallmarks of omnipotence, a world where all reality is merely construction. In this type of thinking there is, I think, a confusion between complexity and relativism. Truths about ourselves and the world are likely to be highly complex and difficult to grasp, and this is a fact of life. When this fact is
12 This issue and others closely related to this theme are more fully discussed by Christopher Lasch (1984) in his somewhat prophetic book The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (see particularly pp. 348). 13 As in the shopping mall the appearance of plurality, consumer choice, is quite illusory, for what is offered is the deadening of experience as all shopping malls look the same.

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apprehended by a personality in which the forces promoting development are uppermost, the result is the painful struggle to comprehend this complexity the ragged untidy process of groping for and sometimes grasping something of how the world is, as Susan Haack calls it. But when this is met with by a personality dominated by more narcissistic forces, the apprehension of complexity becomes the world can be what I want it to be and so all painful struggle is disposed of at one blow. It seems to me that this is just the sort of error made by postmodernists. The features described above as being central to psychoanalysis, particularly the appearancereality distinction, can only make sense if underwritten by a realist ontology. There is an intrinsic relationship between a world-view which accepts inevitable limitation and an epistemology that is realist in this sense, that is, committed to a view that the world as it is is not reducible to the world as I see it. From such a realist perspective the observations we make of the world are causal effects of objects that have a reality independent of our experience of them. There is thus an inevitable limitation to what can be known; what can be known is not co-terminous with what we experience. The mental structures investigated by psychoanalysis are in this sense real and the assumption of such unobservable structures is necessary in order to make the project coherent. Further, presupposing the existence of such structures captures, as Michael Rustin (1999) has pointed out, the idea of unconscious constraints on individual psychic freedom. Psychoanalysis, when underwritten by this realist position, emphasizes the inevitable constraints to human freedom, not least those that derive from the materiality of our own bodies, our inevitable vulnerability, inescapable mental structures, aspects of our own characters that we are not happy about but have to live with. There is a certain sort of deep freedom that arises when individuals who have spent their lives trying to escape all constraints come to accept some of the inevitable limitations of being human, and to distinguish awareness of these ordinary limitations from imprisonment. Freedom is the recognition of necessity.14

Theory and practice

These considerations are not just abstract or purely scholastic questions as what we conceive psychoanalysis to be has profound implications for how we carry out our work. The postmodernist framework brings a view of analytic work well represented in the work of Renik. His views are expressed clearly in his paper The analysts subjectivity and the analysts objectivity (Renik, 1998). For our purposes here I will only pick out one or two points that are relevant to my main theme. Renik in a way that is quite uncontroversial emphasizes the irreducible subjectivity of all interpretive work. But from this he derives the following.
14 This quotation is from Hegel (1812) and was cited by Engels in Anti-Duhring. The full quotation reads as follows: Hegel was the first to state the relation between freedom and necessity correctly. To him, freedom is the recognition of necessity, Necessity is blind only insofar as it is not understood .

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He states, discussing his work with his patient, Ethan:

We were trying to devise a new way for Ethans life, present and past that worked, that helped him feel better. We evaluated the validity of our understanding entirely on the basis of therapeutic efficacy. As I see it, in clinical psychoanalysis as in the rest of science, truth is what works. (Renik, 1998, p. 492, italics in original) [Or] objectivity is a pragmatic concept, it refers to objectives ... (Renik, 1998, p. 491)

For Renik there are no truths that are out there to be discovered, but only what works. The problem this creates is, I think, immediately clear: for how are we to distinguish what works from illusion and wish-fulfilment. Those who view psychoanalysis as involving only narrative truth face exactly this problem. For a coherent consistent narrative of ones life that serves one well and promotes happiness (what works in Reniks terms) may arise from self-deception and thus cannot promote development. Reniks paper was subject to a penetrating critique by Cavell (1998). Relevant to my theme, she states:
[the relativist says] all I can know is how things appear to me, now. What this conclusion overlooks is the distinction between good reasons for belief and bad reasons, good arguments and bad, the difference between trying to take other perspectives into account, and not reflecting at all; between thinking wishfully and fantasying. (Cavell, 1998, p. 1l99)

There is a further problem in Reniks position. His pragmatic approach to truth cannot distinguish different levels in a theory. All explanatory systems are layered; at certain levels what appears to be true or real might be highly conjectural and capable of being replaced without causing any serious problems to the general theory, whilst postulates at other levels within the system may be much more robust. The understanding of a particular session might be easily altered as things develop, but we may have considerably more confidence at a higher level, say, concerning the principal anxieties and conflicts that dominate an individual patients character. At another level still there are more general clinical facts such as transference and projection. Lastly, at the highest level, there is the general theory of mind that psychoanalysis embodies (represented by, for example, the model of conscious/unconscious, the oedipal configuration, etc.). For Renik, nothing in the theory or the practice appears to have more grounds for belief than anything else, as what works is all that matters. Those who maintain a belief in the centrality of truth truthfulness are misunderstood by relativists such as Renik as making omnipotent assertions of Truth with a capital T, in other words crude scientism. This misunderstanding at the level of theory has its counterpart at the level of practice, where the recognition of the need to maintain ordinary boundaries as part of the psychoanalytic setting is misunderstood as a rigid assertion of authority and disregard for the patient. Goldberg
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(2000), in his paper Postmodern psychoanalysis, given to the Nice Congress, suggested that the analytic setting is too rule-bound and that we need to be more flexible and adapt our procedures to suit the patients needs. Irma Brenman Pick pointed out that the speaker misrepresented rules of analytic procedure as deriving from a position of omnipotent authority. Matters having been misrepresented in this way, she pointed out, left only two possibilities available: either mindless submission to the law (father) or complete opposition to all law (psychically equivalent to murder of father). My argument is that the former is crude absolutism, the latter relativism. The last point I wish to make I have made before (see Bell, 2000) and will touch only briefly on it here. A view of psychoanalysis that collapses its truth-claims to merely pragmatic concerns creates some difficulty for understanding the validity of the theory of mind that it represents. How could one decide, on purely pragmatic grounds, whether or not unconscious fantasy was an important part of mental life? For, if the only criterion is pragmatic, namely are such ideas helpful to patients, it is difficult to understand how such knowledge could have any existence independent of its practical use.15 In the discussion of his 1998 paper, when it was presented to the British Psychoanalytic Society, Renik made it clear that, given that he equated psychoanalysis with therapeutic activity, and that judgement of its value lay only in its success in helping patients, he had to assert that psychoanalysis can have no distinct status as a body of knowledge, separable from its practical use as a therapy. The pragmatic version of truth of psychoanalytic interpretations is wedded to an epistemological position, which is, I believe, quite implausible, that is that the objects to which psychoanalytic theories refer are only existent within the psychoanalytic setting.16

Conclusion
By way of conclusion I will firstly summarize the main argument. First, I have suggested that the postmodernist relativization of truth cannot provide a framework for psychoanalysis, for psychoanalysis is I believe committed to a realist ontology. I have attempted to outline certain core features of psychoanalysis that locate it within modernism: here I gave emphasis to the idea of depth expla15 Interestingly, a similar position is taken by many of the critics of psychoanalysis. Although proceeding from a completely different standpoint, they have looked for validation of the core claims of psychoanalysis only within the accounts of treatments, e.g. by re-examining Freuds cases (see Grunbaum, 1986). Grunbaum profoundly misunderstands Freud, as he believes that according to Freuds theory psychic change should result simply from knowledge of facts. He does not seem to understand that it is the overcoming of resistance, not the knowlege of facts, that is at the core of the psychoanalytic understanding of psychic change (for an excellent discussion of this, see Wollheim, 1993). 16 Esman (1998) has helpfully pointed out that the engagement of psychoanalysis with literature, social theory, philosophy, etc. gives important access to it for those who are not analysts and have no wish to be analysed, offering them the opportunity to judge for themselves the value of the explanatory system it offers.

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nation, the crucial distinction between appearance and reality, and the commitment of psychoanalytic explanation to continuity beneath discontinuity. I have further suggested that the understanding of a symptom at one and the same time grasps its meaning, that is it captures what it expresses and displays its causal structure and its causal history. This again commits it to a realist ontology. I have attempted to discuss postmodernism and its relativizing discourse from a psychoanalytic perspective suggesting that its celebration of plurality, fluidity and limitlessness reveals an omnipotent system freed from the constraints of reality, a world where claims can never (by definition) be right, and so can never be wrong. Following Jameson, I have suggested some links between postmodernism and the market form which supports the powerful human tendencies to discard the limitations of reality and seek solace in a world of infinite possibility. The collapse into pragmatics and subjectivism leaves no place for psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge of mind separable from the effectiveness of that knowledge in helping patients, and so, I believe, creates difficulty in accounting for its broader (that is interdisciplinary) relevance. The celebration of subjectivity and plurality, the hallmark of postmodernism, appears to be a long way away from the absolutist assertion of objective reality. Yet it seems to me that really they are opposite side of the same coin. Relativism opposes itself to a crude scientism seen as authoritarian and absolutist. Yet relativism can be asserted with an absolutism that betrays its origins. Often the personality, which at one moment appears to accept only subjectivism, in the next reveals itself to be threatened by an absolutism, which can easily become the basis for identification. Hilary Putnam (1995) states: Whether there is a reality or not is not something on which we can form an opinion, it is just a given of our lived life. He goes on to say, referring to Richard Rorty, that such a (radical) scepticism as this is the flip-side of a craving for an unintelligible kind of certainty (p. 300).17 It is at least plausible that relativism is a radical turning away in disappointment from the unfulfillable demand of certainty. The disappointment and living with uncertainty that might have resulted, is instead replaced by an attack on all truth-claims. The turning away in radical scepticism retains, however, the fundamentalism of its original demands. I do not think that whether there is truth or not is a purely scholastic question. As Susan Haack says: The ragged untidy process of groping for and sometimes grasping something of how the world is is not a male thing or a white thing, but a Human thing (1999, p. 14). The distinctions between objective and subjective, inner and outer, appearance and reality, the world as it is and the world as we perceive it are all inescapable, and our struggle with these apparent polarities is constitutive of
17 Wittgenstein makes a related point in connection with the problem of other minds. He points out that we do not decide whether or not a person is a person like us: My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul (Wittgenstein, 1953, p. 178, italics in original).

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our humanity. Like Putnam, I do not think these are matters on which we can have an opinion. I am reminded of Isaac Bashevis Singer who, when asked Given that you clearly value human freedom so highly, it seems strange that the fate motif figures so strongly in your stories. Do you believe in Free Will?, replied: You gotta you got no choice.

References
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