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Does truth still have a place in the practice of contemporary psychoanalysis? In relation to this special issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Jay Greenberg reminds us that, from its founding, psychoanalysis has seen “what is not known” as underlying the symptoms and problems in living that bring people to treatment. We have taken as fundamental the Freudian insight into the human tendency to avoid truth when it is painful:
The psychic apparatus is intolerant of unpleasure and strives to ward it off at all costs and, if the perception of reality involves unpleasure, that perception—i.e., the truth—must be sacrificed …. One cannot flee from oneself and no flight avails against danger from within; hence the ego's defence-mechanisms are condemned to falsify the inner perception, so that it transmits to us only an imperfect and travestied picture of our id. In its relations with the id the ego is paralysed by its restrictions or blinded by its errors, and the result in the sphere of psychic processes may be compared to the progress of a poor walker in a country which he does not know. [Freud 1937, p. 392, italics added]
Thus, a therapeutic emphasis on revealing the mechanisms of avoidance and self-deception, and on uncovering what has been warded off—