The Ubiquity of Psychopathology and the Quandaries this Imposes for Determining “Reality”

Abstract

In this article, I argue that psychopathology ubiquitously pervades individual and social life. As Freud wrote, each of us finds some way of distorting reality, and as Laing contended, human beings have an almost unlimited capacity for self-deception. History is a chronicle of fantasies, mirages, distortions, and metaphysical consolations believed as apodictic reality, and the bizarre magico-salvific stratagems people adopted to ward off disease, catastrophe, and death. And yet many (even psychoanalysts) maintain the notion (or fantasy) that we perceive reality clearly and sanely. I contend, on the contrary, that we have no epistemologically foolproof way of discerning our own deceptions and defects, and that we find all manner of ingenious excuses not to see ourselves.