You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
August 23, 1999. I have read Lawrence Friedman's beautifully written and “highly partisan account of a complex intellectual history”—“Why is Reality a Troubling Concept?” (JAPA 47/2)—many times over, and each time I find something new in it. His way of considering the philosophical and psychoanalytic problem with reality from the vantage point of the nominalist/realist distinction is fascinating. While I do not agree with some of his conclusions, his scholarship and clarity inspire me to respond. I would like to make four minor points before turning to my main one.
First, I am pleased that Friedman has pointed out the “bad rap” that positivism suffers in current discourse. People are often criticizing a reductive or distilling enterprise that from a philosophical standpoint should be termed essentialism, not positivism. But somehow positivism takes the rap, and I have always wondered why. My own opinion is that the current emphasis on contextualism takes prisoners of any persons or positions that lay claim to certainty, authority, or some notion of objectivity. “Don't be so sure of yourself, you can't be positive” moves from a judgment or objection to the incorrect labeling of a philosophical enterprise.
Second, I have had a pathological realist (of sorts) and a pathological nominalist (of sorts) in my clinical practice, one treatment hour following the other, resulting in some interesting contrasts. The “realist” is a compulsive categorizer, a premature labeler, an externalizing materialist reductionist of sorts, a very narrow sort of engineer. The work here has been to help him become aware of his dread of uncertainty, fear of loss, and all the rest. The “nominalist,” by contrast, is a postmodern religious scholar who views the treatment as a text that can be read from many standpoints. Points are often taken up in conjecture and multiple perspectives. Here the work is to help him to tolerate more embedded and located issues, in his case (I imagine) a fear of his mu