The Experience of Truth in Psychoanalysis Today

The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant’s Mind is Neither Primitive nor Prerepresentational

“…B. Stern and H. Levine are perhaps the most prominent authors offering us their versions of "unformulated" or "unrepresented" experience. But similar ideas have been taken up by many other analytic theorists, too many to list comprehensively, but some of those writing most recently, especially in the "unrepresented" category, include Diamond (2014Diamond ( , 2015Diamond ( , 2020, Busch (2011Busch ( , 2016, Bergstein (2016Bergstein ( , 2018, Botella and Botella (2005), Sopher (2018), Katz (2016), Vartzopoulos and Beratis (2012), Canestri (2004), andBohleber et al (2013). These authors refer to others from past decades who have inspired them, such as Sullivan (1940), Bion (1965, 1970, Green (1975), and Aisenstein (1993, 2006.…”

Atypical Discourses

“…Similar sentiments can be read in Levine (), who considers truth as emergent and highlights the “shift in the aim of analysis, from the recovery of repressed thoughts to the development of the capacity for thinking” (p. 401). Katz () states, “Truth seems to be increasingly used by analysts to refer to a quality of experience , rather than simply an attribute of a representation ” (p. 522, italics in original) . She also quite rightly points out that “psychoanalytic truth, even ‘deep unconscious truth’ … can have no meaning apart from its relation to an other of communication ” (p. 527, italics in original).…”

“…There are other ways of interpreting this symposium, to be sure. Katz () notes that “with the exception of Levine … all [the authors writing in response to this question] implicitly utilize truth partly in the sense of the classical ‘correspondence theory’ of truth. That is to say, they treat it as referring to something that has an independent reality, or exists in the world, and can be known ” (p. 513, italics in original).…”

The Epistemology Behind The Curtain: Thoughts on The Science of Psychoanalysis

“…However, Fonagy's particular conceptual framework situates these concepts in relation to social learning theory and ethology. As Katz () observes, in Allison and Fonagy's () view, “truth is an attribute not of experiences or of representations, but of information” (Katz, p. 518). The risk, underwritten by a privileging of empirically validated knowledge, is for mentalization or epistemic trust to become substitute terms shorn of their psychoanalytic depth and complexity and distanced from the “ontological densities” of subjective experience.…”