Triangulation, one’s own mind and objectivity

Abstract

Some psychoanalysts now hold that an intersubjective model of the mind and of the analytic situation renders the ideas of truth, reality and objectivity obsolete. Arguing from a position of sympathy with this model, the author contends that nevertheless both a real, shared, external world and the concept of such a world are indispensable to propositional thought, and to the capacity to know one's own thoughts as thoughts, as a subjective perspective on the world. Without the idea of an objective world with which we are in touch and which we attempt to be more-or-less objective about, any so-called intersubjectivist model collapses into the one-person paradigm. The author traces a certain developmental line in twentieth-century philosophy that supports an intersubjective view, a line that shows the place of the normative ideas of truth and falsity, right and wrong, in the advent of mind; it attempts to disentangle the concept of truth from an authoritarian view that was implicit in Descartes; it points out connections, and a difference, between the view of triangulation that it argues for and the views espoused by a number of psychoanalysts. Some implications of this intersubjectivist position for psychoanalytic practice are considered; for instance: the interrelations between the analyst's third-person knowledge of her patient, and the patient's developing understanding of himself; and what the concept of unconscious fantasy presupposes.

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