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Traditional psychotherapy, a product of the modern age, is grounded in a classical realist definition of truth. In Freud's view, the process of psychotherapy is analogous to the practice of archeology, a discipline that fascinated Freud and whose discovered products, particularly in the form of unearthed replicas of human beings in diverse cultures, he collected avidly. As the archeologist uncovers what has long been buried, so with Freud. What lay hidden in the unconscious was to be brought to the surface of human self-awareness so that it would no longer fester out of the sight, but, rather, be exposed to the integrating, curative power of reason. Of course, what had been buried in the unconscious through repression was really there; it had a real existence in the being of the psyche. Like the pot or the arrowhead or the skeletal remains of a past culture, so the feeling, desire, or thought of the individual persisted in some important respect as it had been originally rejected. The past was real; the story of the past was real; the products of the past were real; and the theory and practice of psychoanalysis depended on the conviction that there was, in fact, a world whose structure existed independent of our beliefs about it, but whose nature could be discovered through the application of scientific reason.
For quite some time now this view has been under vigorous attack. The idea of an independent reality that can be known through reason, and more particularly science, has been rejected by a number of schools of thought that can be linked together under the rubrics of postmodernism or post-structuralism. The ideal of an independent, knowable reality has given place to notions of multiple realities, each constructed and defined by a given theoretical system that can make no claim to superiority over any other. The idea that reality is constructed rather than discovered, that reason is essentially an agency of invention that answers only to its own creativity and