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No article or book on psychoanalysis is complete, it seems, unless it carries its quota of references to Freud. There is nothing wrong with this in itself of course; we should be surprised if there were no acknowledgements at all to the man who first formulated the parameters of our ‘impossible profession’. And yet, too frequently, Freud is cited in the way that I was once taught to cite legal cases, as authority, as establishing the truth of a particular statement, almost without the need for further argument. In addressing the question of ‘the truth about Freud's technique’, Mike Thompson, an American psychoanalyst who worked at the Philadelphia Association in London with R.D. Laing and his colleagues, is not out to rubbish Freud. Rather he wants to reclaim Freud as the man who said that his whole concern throughout his life was the pursuit of truth, the man for whom there was only one indispensable ‘rule’ of psychoanalysis: in effect, ‘say what you must and don't hide it’. The truth about Freud's technique is, Thompson argues, essentially about truth itself: know your own mind and the truth will set you free.
Although Freud was dismissive of philosophy - he said it was of interest only to a small number of intellectuals and was scarcely intelligible to anyone else - Thompson argues that Freud's quest for truth was inevitably a philosophical one, even if he never conceptualised it in philosophical terms. His reflections on the nature of reality were philosophical queries, not scientific investigations as he might have liked to think, and as so many of his followers have since claimed, and yet his tendency to equate reality with what was externally valid compromised his search for truth. For a better articulated idea of truth Thompson suggests that we look to the philosopher Martin Heidegger for whom the question of truth ‘is his philosophy in its entirety’. For Heidegger, truth is not about a ‘correspondence’ to things, rather truth becomes known by revealing what