Clinical Truth and Contemporary Relativism: Meaning and Narration in the Psychoanalytic Situation

Abstract

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.