Introduction

In essence, psychoanalysis may be regarded as a theory of truth and of the power of truth to cure. “Turn your eyes inwards,” Freud entreats an arrogant ego in an imaginary dialogue, “look into your own depths, learn first to know yourself! Then you will understand why you were bound to fall ill; and perhaps you will avoid falling ill in the future” (1917, 143). According to Freud and generations of his followers, it is the unconscious truth of the mind—psychic reality—that the ego refuses to know, and that in turn makes us ill. In fact, in many ways illness is, according to Freud, the failure to know oneself, self-knowledge being a lived state of integration of unconscious truth—of fantasies, wishes, drives, and feelings often of a conflicted and contradictory nature. Thus, it is not merely a state of impaired mental health that psychoanalysis comes to cure, but one of impaired human existence; and the remedy, truth, is of ethical significance. As Freud wrote in 1914 to the neurologist and moral thinker J. J. Putnam, “the great ethical element in [psychoanalytic] work is truth and again truth” (qtd. in Hale 1971, 171).

But like all strong medicine, truth may be experienced as a dangerous thing. We wish to avoid it through ignorance and doubt, but also through a false certainty that bars an encounter with truths unknown or undesirable by imposing our preconceived ideas on reality. More than any other theory, psychoanalysis has drawn our attention to the psychic obstacles to knowing truth, and how they affect all efforts to understand. These efforts include those of the analyst as well as the patient, those directed towards personal knowledge as well as general theoretical knowledge; and psychoanalytic theory has not exempted itself in this regard.

In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, Freud's own writings about truth exemplify his struggle with the desire for truth, including the doubting, denial, and feelings of certainty that inevitably accompany the search for so elu