You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As my time is limited, I can only touch on a few of the points raised in Avenburg and Guiter's discussion (this issue) of this important subject. One of the aspects that interests me especially is the way in which the conviction that a construction is true is felt by the patient.
We all know what it cost Freud to discover that the reports of infant seduction from his adult patients were not based on external reality. This raised the whole problem of truth in psychoanalysis as a direct challenge. Seduction as a trauma from real experience had to give way to new theories and a deeper understanding of psychic reality, wherein fantasy is recognized to be on a par with truth for the patient, though the fantasy is not, in fact, true in any full sense.
As the psychoanalytical process is essentially a search for truth, or for what truth there is in the analysand's account, it is most important to know how we have arrived at this truth using the therapeutic means at our disposal.
In 'The Question of a Weltanschauung' Freud (1933) takes the criterion of truth as correspondence with the outside world. According to this definition, truth is the relationship between the fact and its representation in the mind, linked by correspondence. Often, what the analysand tells us lacks this correspondence to a greater or lesser degree, since defensive distortion has been at work. The analyst's job is to use intuition to sense the nature of this distortion and offer the analysand an interpretation which will reinstate factual truth.
In 'Constructions in Analysis' Freud (1937) points out that the analyst's conjectures become convictions in the analysand's mind, although the process begun by interpretation is not always successful in restoring the repressed memories to the patient. Freud goes on to say that if the analysis is properly conducted the analysand feels a definite conviction of the truth of the construction given to him, and this achieves the same therapeutic result as a recapt