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Sean Sayers' book is something of a tour de force. It provides an extremely clear account of some central areas in the theory of knowledge and forcibly develops a realist account of knowledge. For Sayers, knowledge is always a reflection - albeit a complex and mediated one - of reality. He defends this view against its traditional opponents such as idealism (the idea that knowledge is merely a construct of ideas and interpretations) and relativism (the idea that all knowledge is merely socially constructed and therefore relative).
The blurb outlines some of the book's central issues as follows: ‘Is knowledge a reflection of reality? What role do experience and interpretation play in knowledge? Can truth be objective or is it socially constructed and relative?’
In answer to these questions, Sayers develops the thesis that all ideas - including false, illusory and irrational ones - reflect objective reality. Why should these questions be of interest to psychotherapists? The history of psychotherapy is littered with examples of what happens if idealist or relativist ideas become fashionable. Like it or not, every psychotherapist confronts such issues in everyday clinical work.
A recent example of idealism at play in our field, is Lacanian psychoanalysis, where it is held that we can never know anything about ‘the Real’ but, rather, are always only dealing with linguistic codes or the illusions of the Imaginary. Such