What If Socrates Had Been A Woman?

BY NOW IT HAS BECOME A COMMONPLACE of epistemological debate to assail the traditional scientific paradigm by acknowledging the role of the observer in determining the nature of the observed. Whether the expert theories of the scientist or the folk theories of ordinary people, such theories, so the story goes, are based on a set of fundamental assumptions that provide interpretive principles in terms of which particular events are necessarily understood. From this perspective, there are no facts that are independent of the knower-scientist-investigator. All aspects of knowledge or understanding require acts of interpretation that depend on the investigator’s precritical assumptions.

The consequence of this antiempiricist or constructivist theory of science for psychoanalytic psychology has involved a profound restructuring of disciplinary self-understanding, moving away from an enterprise whose primary task was conceived as the reconstruction of a single, definitive life history, based on the uncovering of brute facts by a neutral or evenly hovering therapist. Instead, the therapist is now situated within the field of inquiry, so that her particular theoretical biases and precritical assumptions provide different interpretive codes that help to establish “what is to count as data” (Schafer, 1983, p. 212) as well as various ways of understanding those data. According to the constructivist view, the patient’s life history is as much created by the therapist’s preconceptions, which derive from one or more of the various theoretico-narrative accounts concerning the nature of human functioning (e.g., Freud’s, Fairbairn’s,