Postmodern epistemology: The problem of validation and the retreat from therapeutics in psychoanalysis

The pure gold of natural language commentary on Michael J. Bader's “postmodern epistemology: The problem of validation and the retreat from therapeutics in psychoanalysis”*

“…Indeed, the reading metaphor breaks down in the face of a text that talks back-which, according to Gadamer (1975), all texts do if "we remain open to the meaning of the other person or of the text" (p. 238). Or, in Bader's (1998a) example, in the face of a patient who did not talk back but "began to get worse" (p. 20) when Bader's initial hypothesis/story/construction about their experience together turned out to be-do we dare say "wrong"-at least for the moment when both patient and analyst found themselves pressured to play out certain regressive roles determined, in part, by the patient's internal object world.…”

“…Returning to the intent of Bader's (1998a) article-his critique of postmodern trends in psychoanalysis-Bader's main point seems to be that certain realities have to be attended to or even sleuthed by the analyst in an effort to constrain the "anything goes" mentality concerning the validity of interpretations typically associated with the heady yet playfully opulent discourse of postmodern theory-never mind the extent to which the anything-goes gloss is corrrect or not (" Hoffman [1996] weighs in against the misrepresentation of constructivism as an 'anything goes' philosophy"; Bader, 1998a, p. 10), representative or not ("there are often significant differences between theorists who typically get lumped together under the same postmodern banner"; p. 4, n. 1), or brought about by acts of commission or omission (postmodern "theorists tend to veer away from attempting to either define or operationalize their own system of validation"; p. 5). Bader clearly finds the current "emphasis on epistemology" (with its "focus on the constructed nature of analytic knowledge"; p. 3) and the tendency to "fetishize uncertainty, idealize ambiguity, and admire complexity" (p. 25) too limited if not altogether misguided-as well as the concomitant turn to theory viewed as a discourse formation that constitutes the very object domain it purports to represent (Foucault, 1972).…”

“…To be sure, appealing to this voice as an external corrective to the therapist's interpretations as a means of validation, as Bader might have us do- Bader (1998a) commends the effort to elicit "corrective feedback to a therapist" from the patient as a "nonpositivist validation measure" (p. 10)-is itself problematic once the polyvocal (Bakhtin, 1984) constituency of this voice is acknowledged as a fundamental condition of the genre (i.e., the progressive socialization of the patient into particular psychoanalytically informed narrative modes of telling and retelling one's life; Schafer, 1992). That is, that the patient's voice has been intersubjectively contextualized along the lines of any of the canonical psychoanalytic narratives (in our example, the patient averring agency and desire) throws into relief the tremendous difficulty in trying to discern an authentic voice-or an authentically "socialized" (Hoffman, 1996) voice-from the various forms of unexamined compliance patients display.…”

“…Actually, Bader's (1998a) case vignette demonstrates not only a high standard of clinical acumen but an excellent example of the twoperson ontology that organizes the intersubjective process in the clinical encounter. That is, in acknowledging his patient's aggrieved state in the face of an attempt to portray her subjective reality, Bader sensitively relinquished his interpretation, and thereby any potential claim to omniscience or authority in representing the reality of the other, in favor of a second interpretation that met with a much better "fit."…”

Mutual Influence between Rehabilitation and Psychoanalysis

“…However, due to the growing recognition of the ambiguity of personal experience and its constructed nature it has become apparent that the assessment of therapeutic material, such as the client's experiences, the interaction between client and therapist, the client's free associations, and so forth, all receive different interpretations by different therapists, regardless of how experienced they are (Relativism) [6,7].It has also become apparent that observers, merely in their presence within the 'field' in which they are observing, change that field and thus the outcome of their observation [8]. Thus it is clear to therapists today that instead of knowing the truth about the client, they know only one truth of many.…”