Neutrality as an Instrument to Reassess Knowledge

IN THE CONTINUUM BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYSIS and the analytically oriented psychotherapies the notion of neutrality acquires increased significance as we approach the purer state of psychoanalysis. Leaving aside the question of the instrumentalities of psychoanalysis (transference, regression, interpretation), the ideological basis of the psychoanalytic approach to the understanding of the human psyche is the negation of psychic reality as it appears through ordinary mental activity, and the assumption that there is a true content and meaning that remains to be uncovered in the patient's presentation of his being and knowing. Psychoanalysis refuses, in Barratt's terms (1950), the complicity of identity thinking and moves against the ideology of everyday life. Knowledge is bound by our acceptance of the familiar, creating a "false consciousness" which psychoanalysis challenges. By refusing to endorse things as they appear to be, psychoanalysis reopens semiotic closures. This refusal is implicit in the distinction made between conscious and unconscious, which is, as Freud (1923) argues "the fundamental psychoanalytic postulate." The acceptance of this postulate underlines the analytic task and to the extent that we accept this imagery, psychoanalytic methodology attempts to draw a parallel as closely as possible between psychoanalytic and epistemological goals. In this context, I would like to examine the role that analytic neutrality plays as a facilitator of the epistemological tasks of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic neutrality is not the same as the neutrality of the scientific observer and his object of study. Given the contemporary epistemological fact that context-free observation is not possible, it follows that the analyst observes objectively, and experiences subjectively, the patient and himself in interaction. Before entering into the discussion of how analytic neutrality as a concept facilitates the analytic task of knowing, we need to place this concep