In Response to Owen Renik's ‘the Analyst's Subjectivity and the Analyst's Objectivity’

Let's say that all perception is subjective in the following sense: each of us perceives what he or she does from an idiosyncratic position that includes not only her location in space and time, but also her particular (partly shared) vocabulary, her conceptual repertoire, her set of skills, talents, and sensitivities, her psychological history and so on. Every view is partial; there is no such thing as a view from everywhere, or nowhere. These are among the things about which Renik and I totally agree. We also agree that the analyst is not an unbiased observer; and that no matter how well analysed, we are all influenced by things of which we are unaware. We probably also agree that rather than opening up avenues for discussion, the concepts of truth and knowledge are often used—I would say misused—to draw battle lines. There is a large base of agreement between us. We both say that subjectivity and objectivity go hand in hand. But I think we mean very different things by this.

One of the problems with his account is that in turning his plea for the inescapability and the value of the subjective into a plea for a post-modernist sort of relativism, Renik loses sight of distinctions that are important even to his own message. He wants to jettison objectivity as a claim about how things really, objectively, are, and substitute for it objectivity as it pertains to purposes or goals. Renik says we should ask, not ‘What is true, in this instance?’ but ‘What works in this instance?’ Yet his clinical vignette makes clear that he too relies on objectivity in the first sense. I don't think that any sort of reasoned thinking can do without it. Let's look at this vignette.

Renik's patient, Ethan, has the impression that as he was telling the story of saving a patient's life, Renik's attention has wandered. At first Renik thinks this is not true, and explores with Ethan the possible motivations that might explain his erroneous belief about Renik. But as a good inter